GAME Streetmekka Viborg

GAME Streetmekka Viborg is a renovation project that transformed an abandoned windmill factory into a vibrant hub for street sports and street culture, offering various facilities for self-organized sports and social spaces for the local youth of Viborg in Denmark. Located in the outskirts of Viborg, the original building was a typical example of the many mass-produced warehouses from the '70s found in many suburban industrial areas of the world. The original building was perceived as having little historic, cultural and architectural value. Instead of demolition, the focus of the project was on how to take this introverted building and transform it with a very limited budget? Despite the generic appearance, these typologies often contain an impressive interior space and the idea was to expose it to the world. By removing the walls at both ends of the building and placing all the office and workshops on one side and the skating on the other, the interiors are kept as free as possible. The introverted industrial building is transformed into a new kind of interior space: a covered streetscape open to the outside. The streetscape concept is used to define and organize the various functions and place them in relation to specific requirements, such as spatial quality, daylight, materiality and temperature zone. The existing concrete facade is then wrapped with a functional translucent polycarbonate skin, giving the appearance of a light and welcoming building, dynamically changing from day to night and differentiating the building from the surrounding industrial facilities. The building is then filled with functions aimed to meet the increasing demand for self-organized alternatives to the established sports and cultural activities, supporting the client mission to attract local youth and create lasting social change through sports and culture, enabling integration and empowerment in their lives. The program includes facilities for self-organized sports like parkour, skate, bouldering, basketball, trial as well as a series of customized workshop areas for music production, DJ’ing, an animation studio, fab lab and various artist studios and wood and metal workshops. Social spaces and informal meeting areas are distributed throughout the building and strategically interwoven in-between primary functions to foster participation. The surrounding landscape becomes the natural extension of the indoor surface with various street-sports and cultural functions placed in a recreational string of greenery connecting the site to the downtown area through a future pedestrian and bicycle path. The preservation of the original structure and the reuse and upcycling of materials made it possible to carry out the refurbishment at a very low expense. Many of the original components were also repurposed as furniture elements for the parkour activities and hang-out spaces. As a result, the final cost of the building is approximately one-third of a traditional sports hall. With many vacated industrial sites being incorporated in urban expansion, this approach may be replicated and can pave the way for the revitalization of many other disregarded buildings left to deteriorate or facing demolition.