Jihoon Baek’s inventive reimagining of the Gurnell Leisure Centre in Ealing, west London– winner of the Student Reward at the Test of Time Awards 2025– explores metropolitan disconnection and fair leisure chances throughout Metropolitan Open Land.
My proposal deals with public open lands for leisure and sports that are too often temporary or minimal in scale– conditions that erode long-term social, environmental, and functional resilience. Focusing on Metropolitan Open Land, with its aging leisure infrastructure and constrained, controlled river, I propose a revitalisation technique that provides equitable, water- based leisure facilities. This strategy reacts to climate urgency– especially flood danger– while enhancing ecological performance, public ease of access, and neighborhood worth, in line with the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
Metropolitan Open Land (MOL) is a planning classification special to London. Like the Green Belt, it protects green area to protect public access to leisure areas and to resist intrusive advancement. The task site lies within the MOL floodplain at Gurnell Leisure Centre in Ealing, bordered by the River Brent and neighbouring towns. Although the MOL covers about 10,000 hectares, almost half is successfully unattainable, typically occupied by personal golf courses and more fragmented by river facilities that interrupts natural floodplains. The Gurnell Leisure Centre itself, only 50 years old, is arranged for demolition well before the end of its material life, showing the fragility and short-lived nature of public leisure infrastructure.
The word leisure comes from the Latin licere, implying ‘to be enabled.’ Yet, throughout the Metropolitan Open Land, gain access to is far from universal. Instead of welcoming everyone, the land frequently pieces towns, interrupts operating floodplains, and weakens living ecologies. This task reimagines the existing leisure centre and its surrounding infrastructural barriers as opportunities to transform disconnection into connection, restoring accessibility, and developing truly fair leisure across the MOL. It also reinforces the land’s durability for active public life.
The choice to retrofit the existing structure will conserve an approximated ₤ 1m compared to demolition and new building, as well as promote long-term land stewardship. Reconnecting through existing facilities also makes use of the local memories shaped by repeating floods. Like the short-lived leisure and river structures across the Metropolitan Open Land, homeowners’ lived experiences have actually long been governed by distant authorities and mechanical flood controls. These interventions have left the floodplains less durable to increasing flood dangers. With time, the job recognises that recuperating the regional memory embedded in these floodplains is necessary to attaining really fair leisure.
This procedure resulted in a series of sketch models checking out how existing facilities might be repurposed to restore regional memories of intimate leisure along the River Brent and throughout the floodplains of the Metropolitan Open Land. The design likewise draws historical motivation from the former wastewater treatment facility on the site. Aspects are reimagined: a corrugated roofing ends up being a bird conceal, brickwork transforms into public baths, and concrete slabs develop into branching water channels that enrich natural flows and reconnect river-driven ecologies.
< img width=" 1700"height ="818"src ="https://atlive-wp.s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/Render-06.jpg"alt= ""/ > A footbridge reconnects river -divided towns, linking the retrofitted leisure centre with brand-new neighborhood centers and reprieve huts. The website strategy enhances the existing ecology and landscape by introducing brand-new tree planting. Flood-risk zones are thoroughly mapped, and trees are planted in 3 unique layers that react to both fluvial and surface flooding. A brand-new footbridge reconnects towns when separated by the river, connecting the retrofitted leisure centre with freshly presented community centers and small break huts.
A main argument of the proposition is to retrofit the existing structure rather than demolish it. This strategy can access low-carbon retrofit grants and relieve the council’s capital burden. Based on the costing workout, maintaining the substructure and most main walls keeps the full retrofit cost to about ₤ 18 million, an estimated ₤ 1m less than demolition and new building and construction. Beyond monetary savings, the method promotes long-lasting land stewardship by extending the RIBA Strategy of Work beyond end-of-life and promoting enduring partnerships specifically for MOL. The project engages architects, the Brent River & Canal Society, locals’ associations, regional colleges, and makers to deliver community-based flood-resilience education and workshops.
Bird’s-eye view and areas. The rippling geometry of the roofing is duplicated throughout smaller brand-new structures, strengthening programmatic coherence and making it possible for nature-led, integrated usages across the site.
The clusters of floodplain leisure infrastructure comprise the leisure centre, which blurs the limit between indoor and outdoor water-based sport and entertainment; community centers that teach flood defence for the broader Metropolitan Open Land; and open-air centers for moments of singular connection to floodplain ecology or for hanging out with one another. Holistically, they offer an environment that fixes up the regional memory of living along floodplains, and supports resilience through enhanced eco-friendly and social connections.
The in-building water sport and leisure programmes, together with their supporting centers, are repositioned to optimise passive humidity control and improve thermal convenience, enabling moderate indirect sunshine in the interior without glare and guaranteeing natural ventilation. Keeping the existing substructure decreases structural requirements for the eastern swimming-pool extension, which is built with biosolid-mix concrete. The structure’s geometry embraces a gentle slope, clad in biosolid-mix terracotta panels and refitted standing-seam steel sheets, creating an extension of the landscape rather than a blockage.
Drawing showing the meticulous retrofit procedure. The design employs a versatile, landscape-responsive structure that supports water-led leisure and acknowledges local flood histories.
The picked materials and spatial design supply clear circulation and robust fire resistance, supporting long-lasting health and wellbeing and security within the building. The structural design embodies resilience through versatility, using three beam lengths signed up with by rotating pin connections in line with design-for-disassembly concepts. This approach makes it possible for the structure to adjust and develop to satisfy both ecological and altering community requirements, instead of resisting them.
In the very first of three narrative series, the project demonstrates the retrofit of the existing Gurnell Leisure Centre by repurposing building pieces and refitting systems with modular parts. On-site dealt with biosolids in the procedure of purifying the contaminated soil and river water are utilized in concrete and terracotta mixes, while restored steel panels form the roof. The design produces open outside leisure locations, showcases visible sustainable energy systems, and supplies an available roofing that extends the natural landscape into the building.
A folded-plate roof supplies structural stability with very little internal columns, increasing openness and presenting geometric patterns that make it appear cradled by the surrounding tree canopies. Bush- hammered surfaces on the roof interior and column exteriors integrate the building’s style intent with the growing trees around the boundary. The roof’s rippling type is echoed across smaller sized structures throughout the website, developing programmatic coherence and supporting nature-driven, integrated uses across the Metropolitan Open Land.
Landscape design. The job includes al fresco leisure areas and an available roof that extends the surrounding landscape into the building.
Guided by the design intent for versatility, the structure is pictured to respond to rising and receding water levels during floods, allowing both human beings and non-humans to notice environmental change without dependence on mechanical systems. This is demonstrated in the neighborhood center, where the back is anchored to the ground, while the front drifts on a meshed structure filled with recycled plastics and stabilised by poles. These centers also function as workshops for producing biosolid-mix terracotta panels, utilized both to roof the retrofitted leisure centre and as freestanding installations on site. The panels produce discreet areas for observing floodplain ecology as wildlife hides and,
gradually, form low mounds as sediments naturally collect behind them. This creates a lasting minute as the soil building up behind the standing panels provides sanctuary for endangered local fauna and slowly shapes a new landscape. Human interaction stays indirect and non-destructive, improving the flood-attenuation capacity of the Metropolitan Open Land and strengthening the cooperative relationship between individuals and wildlife.
The structure’s energy and heating systems operate with minimal reliance on the main grid. Heating is supplied by a river-water source heat pump and supplemented by waste heat recovered from the pools. An incorporated micro-anaerobic digester generates additional bioenergy to power the system and produces biosolids that can be reused as sustainable building materials.
To summarise, the project extends beyond retrofitting a weakening, brief leisure center to reconsidering the Metropolitan Open Land itself– an area challenged by rising city flood risk, a shortage of fair social and active leisure space, and the requirement for sustaining public infrastructure. The design introduces a flexible structural system that responds to the land with durability, water-flow-driven leisure programs and practices that honour regional memories of flooding, and ecological stewardship that establishes responsible reciprocity between individuals and other organisms. Together, these methods intend to protect a long-lasting, sustainable future and safeguard public access to susceptible open floodplains on the Metropolitan Open Land and beyond.