Fadanni Jean-Baptiste

For the arrangement of Meuse river’s banks in Visé and the establishment of an aquatic center related on sport and body well-being, the choice was made to create an ecological system consisted of natural islands and fitted out islands. The main equipment (a swimming pool for sport and one for well-being) rests on the embankments of the railroad which as an artificial hill characterizes the place and allows the architecture to open on the entire site and on the stretch of water.

The well-being part (cold, tepid and hot pools, sauna, hammam,…) encrusts itself in the hillock and recreates the interface between the ground, the dark, the inside, and the water, the light, the outside. It takes the shape of a superposition of exfoliated slices of landscape from hill’s top to the Meuse. These bands are articulated around the central point of the project, node of all external public courses and distribution of the pools: a cone in the open air, in the wall of which one circulates. It puts in scene the sky and the helicoidal movement of the walker. The sporting part comes unhooked from the cone and seems to float in the water. In a simple and stiff shape, deliberate geometrical abstraction, it’s the inside’s sport movement which gives life to the space. A system of a double wall accessible by stairs and landings (like scaffoldings) allows the swimmer to reach slides, diving boards, terraces or suspended beaches by being at the same time in the swimming pool and totally plunged into the landscape.

The will was to create at the same moment playful, surprising, complex-less and symbolic, almost mystic architecture, staging on one hand the water, the sky, the landscape, and one the other hand the walker, the swimmer, the user.