‘The gymnasts who are graceful co-exist with the rough hockey players.’

As a teenager I spoke to observed, Crystal Palace Sports Centre creates a sense of connectedness between the different activities. Part of the presence of the building is to do with how you are aware of, for example, a Jiu-Jitsu competition taking place while you are engaged with the meditative process of swimming lengths in the 50m pool.

In the spatial presence of these activities I would like to propose an equality between the potentially less framed activities of having a cup of tea in the café, or getting changed - with the sports activities for which the building and grounds are designed to make space for and draw attention to, such as diving or athletics.

These different activities, which take place in or around the sports centre generate and suggest different types of physical relationships with the building. This is true of the way that the different movements dictated by various sports occupy the space, the velocity and types of movements engendered, as well as the relationships they set up between different sports people.

In Lefebvre’s chapter, ‘Spatial Architectonics’ in ‘The Production of Space’ (Lefebvre: 1974) he explores, ‘not bodies in general, nor corporeality but a specific body, a body capable of indicating direction by a gesture, of defining rotation by turning round, of demarcating and orienting space.’ There is a sense of the specificity of movements interacting with the demarcated interior of the building. 

Several users of the building reflected on the different conditions and relationships set up by the building. Dominating the space and creating a presence as soon as you enter the building is the 50 m Olympic size swimming pool. The presence is visual as a huge stretch of water bouncing off light, but it also generates particular sounds and smells. The interior temperature of the whole building is coolish by the standards of swimming pools. I assume the swimmers happy to take on the Olympic scale are not so worried by this.

It lies next to floor to ceiling length panelled glass demarcating the pool from the park. The pool thus transmits a brilliant reflective glowing presence on a sunny day. On a more overcast day or after dark it has a stronger reflection from the lights inside the building. The courts on the opposite side of the building are often used for competitive team sports sometimes with large crowds, like basketball.

The presence and space of the building is also felt acoustically. As Lefebvre describes,

‘In a cloister or cathedral space is measured by the ear: the sounds, voices and singing reverberate in an interplay analogous to that between the most basic sounds and tones; analogous also to the interplay set up when a reading  voice breathes new life into a written text. Architectural volumes ensure a correlation between the rhythms that they entertain (gaits, ritual gestures, processions, parades, etc.) and their musical presence. It is in this way, and at this level, in the non-visible, that bodies find one another.’ (Lefebvre: 1974, p224)