.jpg?1369284622 "Courtesy of QLAB")
.jpg?1369284740 "Courtesy of QLAB")
Text description provided by the architects. Introduction
The National Tainan First Senior High School (NTFSH) Gymnasium project is located at the heart of the Tainan City where it is also situated at the center of Tainan Cultural and Educational District. Its adjacent institutions include the well-known National Cheng-Kung University, the University of Tainan as well as many historical landmarks. The site provides potential opportunities to bridge the history with the present in a contemporary built form that speaks about confluence of architecture and structure in one cohesive gesture.
Design Concept
The program calls for a gymnasium that would house two international-standard basketball courts, a semi-outdoor basketball court, a fitness center, a table tennis room and a Chinese martial-arts classroom. The building also boasts a total number of eighteen-hundred seats for the Sports Hall along with a state-of-the-art control room and a VIP lounge. With a wide variety of spaces required for this new facility, long-span structure is essential and crucial to provide high-quality sports space for its students and the community. The concept for the building begins with the semi-outdoor basketball court on the first floor which requires a column-free space that spans sixteen meters in width and forty meters in length.
The immediate program above it also requires to house several classrooms and most importantly, two international-standard basketball courts, that require a forty meters by fifty-six meters column-free space. With several long-span spaces intended, a creative structural system was key to design this particular gymnasium project. The solution was to design the building that acts like a bridge on all four sides of elevation and together lift and support the load of each floor slabs without having to place columns in the middle of it. A truss-like bracing member was then designed and deployed to connect the form into one cohesive mass that speaks of confluence of Architecture and Structure. The end result expresses the contemporary take on sports building that blends form with intended function in one simple box.
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