The realization of buildings and facilities that prove to be effective and functional starts from the good work of the architect or engineer. In order to balance the accounts.
In the designer’s hands
Also published in: Tsport 330
The “Sail” by Calatrava nowadays (Google Street)
The updating of the register of unfinished public works in Italy, provided for by a specific law, as of 30 June 2019, records a number of 546 works, for a value of 4,068,090,161.43 euros.
The causes of the large number of public works blocked are various: bad drafting of tenders or specifications, instrumental appeals to the court by executors and excluded; or they are works that remain unfinished due to insufficient financial coverage, also due to the incompleteness of the projects, not detailed enough or even incorrect, which impose many variations in the course of work and a consequent rise in costs compared to the economic plan.
The image of the architect who – according to a survey presented at the National Congress of Architects in 2018 – would still be perceived by the public is gratifying: “he who generates ideas capable of meeting the needs of the entire social body, able to improve the quality of life and relationships over time …”.
However, in our daily meeting with the realizations in terms of sports facilities, among the excellences and the good projects of which we give account we have happened to see works lacking in design or execution, suspended, delayed, inaugurated and already unused…
They’re minor cases, of course, they’re route accidents, unfortunate coincidences. But we appeal to the designers: the correct measurements, the right materials, the most suitable shapes, are the starting point to get to the finished work, beautiful and useful, like those you find (almost always) in our pages. And taking up a recent report by Bruno Cattaneo (president of Fipav), it is up to the designer to consider that a volleyball field must have a minimum internal height of 7 meters, not one centimeter less …
The cover picture
The sports centre designed by Santiago Calatrava in Tor Vergata (Rome) for the 2009 World Swimming Championships has never been completed, with costs 11 times higher than the allocated funds and marked by various legal proceedings against various parties involved. Some scenes from Netflix’s TV series “Suburra” have been shot in these abandoned spaces.
