Project: Rajiv Gandhi Sports Complex | Athletic Ripples
Location: Raibareilly | India
Year: 2010
Foundation Stone: 07.02.2011 by Sonia Gandhi
Collaboration: Studio Symbiosis
Trajectories of Movement Interwoven with Activities

“Athletic Ripples” is a project based on interfacing the user and his built environment into a coherent whole. The program has been translated into trajectories of movement. These flow lines generated the formal idea which is underlined by interweaving of the various activities. This results in creating a design with an inherent quality of interaction.

The program analysis resulted in the distribution of the various functions on site. Conceptually these programmatic zones were treated as pebbled dropped in water. It is the inference of the water field, thus creating ripples giving a guideline for the formal design language of the project.

As a design outlook it has been taken into account that being a sports complex an atmosphere of being nested in nature is created. The built form does not sit in disjunction with the surroundings, but on the contrary flows out of the landscape itself.

The central pedestrian zone caters for the primary movement on site. This linear zone has been kept exclusively for the pedestrians, thereby instilling the feeling of being in a green sports complex. It has been attempted to eliminate the dogma of vehicular congestion related to projects like this. This corridor being axial in nature branches into different activities.

A continuous silhouette has been designed for the project. The design proposal seems to be emerging from the landscape and creates the various forms still keeping an overall gesture.

To ensure that vehicular movement is not interfering with the sports areas, a pedestrian zone has been defined where players and students could move around with the feeling of moving with nature around them.

The seating for the sports areas has been designed as a part of the landscape and performs a dual task.

It was felt that children with special talent or aptitude should be provided opportunities to progress at a faster pace, by making good quality education available to them, irrespective of their capability to pay for it. Such education would enable students from rural areas to compete with the urban counterparts on equal footing.

With the recent achievements in sports by the Indian athletes and the importance of excellence in sports signifies the growth of a nation at the grass root level. Shri. Jawaharlal Nehru once said that “Dams are the temples of modern India”. In view of the contemporary outlook it could well be said that “Sports complex’s are the temples of contemporary India”.