Le Spot

Competition film for VenhoevenCS's aquatic and sports centre in Créteil

A timber pool in a Paris park

The architects’ wish list for Créteil’s new aquatic centre listed timber, tiles and skylights. Above every one of them they wrote “Fun!!” – twice. Timber and tiles are easy to render. Fun takes people, noise and plenty of light, so we filled the building with all three.

VenhoevenCS, the Amsterdam practice, got in touch in March 2025 about a competition: a new aquatic and sports centre in Créteil, just south-east of Paris, on the edge of the Parc de la Brèche. Pools are nothing new to them. With Ateliers 2/3/4/, they designed the Olympic Aquatics Centre in Saint-Denis, the only new permanent venue built for Paris 2024. For Créteil, the brief put its concept in one line: “Brutalism reinvented through the use of raw wood.” A mineral concrete podium. A timber frame. Green roofs. And the park pulled right round the building, so the swimmers look straight out into the trees.

Atmosphere first, materials second

They asked us for four views and described the mood of each before its materials. The pool hall: blue tiles in several tones, a wooden ceiling for the acoustics, a big skylight, water games for the smallest children and benches along the side for the parents keeping an eye on them. The sports hall: people playing table tennis on a pink floor, under skylights turned at playful angles. (It came out red. Nobody complained.) The forecourt: a ramp and stairs half taken over by planting, reading as the way into the park, and families from every background, because Créteil is a multicultural area. And the solarium: wooden platforms divided by planting, one for yoga, one for the kids, one for the parents to do nothing at all.

That is rare. Most briefs tell us what a building is made of. VenhoevenCS told us who should be in it and how loud they should be.

A table tennis tournament on red courts under a timber grid roof with skylights, spectators in the foreground.

A day in the life of a pool

The film is 84 seconds long and covers a single day. A walk-through would have shown the rooms. A day shows what they are for. It also lets the building fill up slowly, the way the brief imagined it: quiet in the morning, loud and fun by the afternoon.

Our first cut of the pool was moody, all dramatic light and dark water. It looked good. But it hid what makes the building, and “Fun!!” is hard to see in the dark. So we switched the lights on.