Located at the intersection between a major urban arterial route, a mid-sized commercial street, a smaller residential street and a ground-level subway route, this proposed recreation center also needs to accomodate an existing building occupying the primary corner of the site. This second semester Harvard GSD studio project expands upon the previous one, requiring the negotiation of a more complex site and program. The sizes and shapes of the necessary program elements, especially the basketball court and the swimming pool, combined with zoning limitations on height and volume, requires inventive means to create a coherent building.
The proposal is organized around the stacking of the large and dimensionally unmalleable program elements, the basketball court and pool, placed one on top of the other. This configuration creates two opposite experiences - the lower basketball court on the main level is horizontally transparent, while the pool above is enclosed in an opaque box open only to the sky. Spectators and visitors can observe the basketball court from the interior and exterior through large glass walls, but the pool is visible from the interior and roof deck only. This configuration was first tested in a siteless, uniform box and then tailored specifically to the Brookline, MA site.
To interrupt the strict separation between the open main level and enclosed upper level, a section of the deep end of the pool extends through the floor, down past the front of the basketball court and into the basement, creating an unexpected diving well. An uncanny juxtaposition is created - divers can look in directly to a basketball game and out onto traffic.
Other spaces, such as the changing rooms, bathrooms, offices and cafe are located toward the rear and side of the building, linked to the stacked activity spaces by a staircase that contains a climbing wall, extending from the basement to the roof deck. Because the required height of these smaller spaces is less than that of the large active spaces, the cafe and offices are configured to fill the difference, snaking between the basketball court and pool without expanding the volumetric enclosure of the entire building.
