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Charlemagne Sport Complex
Charlemagne Sport Complex
Sélestat, France
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Other Projects by Antonelli + Herry Architectes
Charlemagne Sport Complex
Sélestat, France
Type
STATUS
Built
YEAR
2025
SIZE
100,000 sqft - 300,000 sqft
BUDGET
$10M - 50M
On the eve of the Paris Olympic Games, Sélestat envisioned a tool for urban development through sport: the Charlemagne Project. It draws on the relationship between two scales — the first tied to the everyday reality of local practice, that of clubs and schools, the second stemming from a national ambition linked to hosting large-scale events and affiliation with various sports federations. Located on the Lycée Koeberlé site, within an urbanized area close to the town center, the project sets out to concentrate sporting activities without excessive land consumption. On a compact footprint, it ensures a rich functional mix and maximizes both offer and possibility. The new hub approaches comprehensiveness, and its programmatic richness endows the project with a genuine sporting collection — almost encyclopedic in scope. Such a facility immediately becomes a social catalyst within its city: a place where sporting practice merges with urban life, where encounter and conviviality extend beyond physical effort, and where public space finds a new intensity.
Architecture thus becomes a tool for organizing this abundance. It manages flows, capacities, crowds, and the varying profiles of users; it orders the simultaneity of functions and ensures the harmonious coexistence of practices. Two unifying devices drive this logic. First, a clear and legible interior street extends public space through the complex. The backbone of the project, it divides, organizes, irrigates, and coordinates it. The work on atmosphere completes this picture. Natural timber and raw concrete find their contrast in the clarity of white surfaces and the depth of black ceilings, punctuated with insistence by sharp, energetic yellows. The graphic vocabulary deployed throughout is borrowed from the world of sport, completing the portrait of a facility that is equally a place of life, movement, encounter, and self-transcendence.
While the Charlemagne Project constitutes a major sporting hub, it remains first and foremost a renovation and new-build that is attentive to the challenges of its time. Given the scale of the works, carbon footprint management is a design tool in its own right, on a par with the study of energy expenditure. Bio-based materials play a defining role in the interior atmosphere, while sobriety and reuse guide the overall architectural expression. The functional composition therefore incorporates two existing gymnasiums — a small and a medium-sized hall. Reactivated to enrich the variety of the sporting offer, they adjoin the new spaces and together form a compact, efficient cluster. The two existing halls sit to the east of the interior street, while to the west, the new large hall is positioned opposite, rotated 90 degrees. The whole develops in density across three levels, connected by the interior street and its crossings.
The large hall is partially sunk below ground, revealing a basement anchored by a multipurpose and weights room, as well as a triple-height climbing wall linking through to the ground floor. The ground floor serves the two existing halls and the athletics track. On the upper level, convivial spaces, a clubhouse, flexible rooms, a wrestling hall, and a billiards room further enrich this abundance.
Outside, a vast forecourt opens the perspective onto a façade of golden mesh latticework, which sustains a subtle ambiguity. Is this still a sports complex, or rather a museum of sport — or perhaps a performance venue? Through plays of transparency and veiling, the building becomes a scenographed showcase of the sporting landscape and movement it contains. In the controlled density of its organization as much as in the quiet expressiveness of its façade, it asserts itself as a new landmark — a signal that reveals sport as much as it serves it.
Architecture thus becomes a tool for organizing this abundance. It manages flows, capacities, crowds, and the varying profiles of users; it orders the simultaneity of functions and ensures the harmonious coexistence of practices. Two unifying devices drive this logic. First, a clear and legible interior street extends public space through the complex. The backbone of the project, it divides, organizes, irrigates, and coordinates it. The work on atmosphere completes this picture. Natural timber and raw concrete find their contrast in the clarity of white surfaces and the depth of black ceilings, punctuated with insistence by sharp, energetic yellows. The graphic vocabulary deployed throughout is borrowed from the world of sport, completing the portrait of a facility that is equally a place of life, movement, encounter, and self-transcendence.
While the Charlemagne Project constitutes a major sporting hub, it remains first and foremost a renovation and new-build that is attentive to the challenges of its time. Given the scale of the works, carbon footprint management is a design tool in its own right, on a par with the study of energy expenditure. Bio-based materials play a defining role in the interior atmosphere, while sobriety and reuse guide the overall architectural expression. The functional composition therefore incorporates two existing gymnasiums — a small and a medium-sized hall. Reactivated to enrich the variety of the sporting offer, they adjoin the new spaces and together form a compact, efficient cluster. The two existing halls sit to the east of the interior street, while to the west, the new large hall is positioned opposite, rotated 90 degrees. The whole develops in density across three levels, connected by the interior street and its crossings.
The large hall is partially sunk below ground, revealing a basement anchored by a multipurpose and weights room, as well as a triple-height climbing wall linking through to the ground floor. The ground floor serves the two existing halls and the athletics track. On the upper level, convivial spaces, a clubhouse, flexible rooms, a wrestling hall, and a billiards room further enrich this abundance.
Outside, a vast forecourt opens the perspective onto a façade of golden mesh latticework, which sustains a subtle ambiguity. Is this still a sports complex, or rather a museum of sport — or perhaps a performance venue? Through plays of transparency and veiling, the building becomes a scenographed showcase of the sporting landscape and movement it contains. In the controlled density of its organization as much as in the quiet expressiveness of its façade, it asserts itself as a new landmark — a signal that reveals sport as much as it serves it.
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