Reach Higher
TEAM: Narcisa Ioniță, Roxana Jilescu, Cristina Lungu, Vlad Voicu – Romanian – University of Architecture and Urbanism „Ion Mincu”
Healthy City. Healthy Community. Healthy individuals.
One popular sport these days is rock climbing.For those who want to train in an urban environment or simply can’t make the trip to the mountains, wall climbing is a perfect substitute.
Climbing is a sport in which you improve steadily and it boosts your confidence.By practicing it, you get a full-body workout, and by 2020 it will also be an Olympic Sport.
To design a training ground for wall climbing, we decided to use the entire city as a sport-facility, using an urban element that architects and urban planners struggle to deal with: blind walls.
Being a result of either demolitions or urban regulations, blind walls play an important role in the evolution of the city as they shape it’s image.By using them for the design, exercising gains a social value as it improves not only the well being of the individual, but that of the community as well.
The climbing surface is flexible: a concave module (you can grab it, pull yourself), a convex one (providing more feet room) and a flat one (making the climbing harder).By combining them you can increase/decrease the difficulty level.The composite modules are fixated with a clipping system by a grid that entangles the blind walls.
This design is healing at an urban level and makes the individual, community and city healthier.