Built in the 1970s by Bernard Schoeller, in the context of a large-scape plan for developing a network of state-owned sporting facilities, the Tournesol swimming pool center of Lingolsheim (France) is renovated, having undergone an intervention that has successfully transformed the building’s look while keeping its essence intact. The characteristic note of the project rests in its dome, which, autonomous from a formal point of view, has been revamped with maximum respect for the original construction.

The overhaul of the roof maintains both the scheme of the preceding one – 36 metallic arches, of which a third are retractable – and its particular system of large doors sliding open as much as 120 degrees on circular rails. The outer envelope, however, has become a skin of black rubber that sustantially improves the building’s overall thermal performance. The complex is traversed by a grid of skylights with two layers of translucent glass, arranged in accordance with a radial pattern.

The intervention involved demolishing various enlargements of the pool facilities that had been undertaken in the course of time, and replacing them with a pavilion annex, shaped like a boomerang, which neither touches nor deforms the structure. The result is a space that is able to relate with its surroundings very directly, through that large mobile gate which works both as a roof and as a vertical enclosure, and demonstrates that sometimes the best option for developing a new project lies in enhancing what is already there.