FS20, Albis Arena, Project by Group 15
Boulodrome
A warm sunday afternoon. It must be the first this year. A silver ball in his hand, a little wooden ball some ten meters in front of him. “Tu tires où tu pointes?” shouts this colleague in the back. He aims at his target, tips his upper body slightly forward, his right arm stretches out, his left leg lifts off the ground to keep balance and then he throws his ball. There goes the shiny ball, gliding lightly through the air before hitting the ground. From there it continues its path, pushing other balls out of its way before it finally reaches its stop. Heads turn. It stopped next to the wooden ball. We won.
Pétanque, a sport that belongs to the family of boules, embraces serenity and does not need spectacle. It is a sport of the everyday. But despite its modesty, the arrangement of a group of round boules never fails to make one stop, rest and watch. With its simple setting, it occupies urban piazzas and secluded corners of parks. As a sport for the collective neither does it require much equipment nor many skills.
A Boulodrome transforms the Schiessanlage into an isle of the everyday, where everyone finds a place to rest and observe a simple game of Pétanque. The sport of Pétanque carries with it an appreciation for the seeming mundanity of the everyday. At the Boulodrome, however, the everyday becomes the spectacle.
“All of these Gardens indulge in a kind of delirium that comes with the release from responsibilities in the World: as Man was cast out of the Garden [Eden], obligation, toil, hardship and pain became his burden, so a return to a fantasy of the Garden [...] implies that all the shocks and natural heartaches of the World are replaced with pleasure; with ludic entertainments, titillations, excitements, and even the thrill of panic and terror.“
Our Boulodrome is a contemporary garden of entertainment, of committed participation in and close observation of the sport, of seeing and being seen. The relationship between players and spectators becomes the driving force in the garden design.
Topography, vegetation and existing buildings serve as a starting point in defining axes across the area. Where two axes meet, a timber structure allows for observing the surrounding fields of play, but they too allow to look further to where another game of boules could be happening. The existing buildings of the shooting range are used similarly, as end-points of axes giving space to boules-playing and creating moments of observation.
The act of observing is already celebrated along the Panoramaweg, which connects a diverse set of landscape rooms of Friesenberg. Our Boulodrome enhances as such the existing momentum of seeing and being seen from the stage that is Friesenberg.













