Civilities

A civil facility, or a civility, is usually a contrivance that facilitates something; a place for actually doing something. Facilities hardly every enter the domain of architecture; if in any case, facilities are only applied to architecture. The two buildings Juchhof 1 and 2 are civic facilities themselves, their presence meant to produce the effect of a dialogue with their surroundings, to generate experiences, in this case the experiences of a landscape fully committed to sporting activities.
 
To be well prepared for the European Football Championship in 2008, the City of Zürich built new training facilities. Along the railway tracks in the western part of the city thirteen new training fields are built. In total the fields added up to an impressive landscape stretching almost over 1’500 m. To supply the outdoor program with changing and support facilities two new buildings were erected to establish an entire training entity for the Championship.
 
In the horizontal ever extending landscape of green artificial and natural lawns the two new buildings were placed about 400 m apart from each other lining up with the geometry of the Championship soccer fields. Identical in dimension and program, the buildings exactly measures in length the width of a football field. The rhythmic division of the new sporting landscape divided into identical fenced fields organized almost automatically the positioning and the architecture of the two new buildings.
 
As if the fenced soccer fields would simply change their function from action to preparation, both buildings are fenced in and are further cultivating the predominated materialization of the purely utilitarian division of the existing landscape in to an array of geometrical fields.