Arribe Ataio town hall and pelota court by Vaumm

Marcus Fairs | 9 January 2009 7 comments

Basque architects Vaumm have completed a town hall and pelota court (udaletxea and pilotalekua) at Arribe Ataio in Navarra, Spain.

The two buildings include elements of the regional farmhouse vernacular, with shallow pitched roofs and arcades at ground level.

Here's some info from Vaumm:

Pilotalekua & Udaletxea/Frontón & Ayuntamiento/Town Hall and Pelota Court, Arribe Ataio

The project looks for a continuity on the architecture and the arrangement of the surrounding, from an up-to-date architectural language, both material formalizing and its insertion in a certain kind of landscape.

This way, the pelota court volume sinks, taking the opportunity that the two walls are solid, required for the pelota game as retaining walls, and using the difference of level as stands for the spectators, having as a result a less visual impact volume, which roof has a dialog with the tradicional roofs of the farm houses of the valley.

The townhall building is composed of a little volume that respects the pelota court cornice height, dividing the administrative programme in two floors, the lower one rests on the excavation created and the upper one shows an up-to-date re-reading of farm pavilion, settled down as the same heigth of the adjacent field.

Both buildings use wood, the vernacular material of great influence in the surroundings, from an up-to-date arrangement, having continuities both the wooden cladding structure, typical of the valley buildings, solved in the pelota court with steel structures, and the farm pavilions wooden cladding structures, solved with red cedar panels.

Besides, both buildings restore their social character organizing a minimum public space, next to the stream, which original way we reinstate, with elements, almost iconographycal, as the balcony of the townhall, the typical porch of the buildings on rainy north, or the night illumination that through the traslucent facades introduces a discontinuity in the linearity of the valley.