A Sports Hall and the Desire to Do Everything Right
In a small town in Switzerland, officials are debating whether a newly built sports hall may have to be demolished and rebuilt. This is not satire. A project conceived as a model of sustainability may end up being constructed twice.
If reducing resource use and CO₂ emissions was the aim, it has been missed in the most literal way possible. Few things are less sustainable than tearing down a new building because it cannot be trusted to stand.
This is a sports hall. Not a concert hall, not a landmark, not an experimental structure. A sports hall is among the simplest public buildings imaginable: a large, robust space, repetitive loads, no architectural heroics required. We have been building them reliably for generations. And yet here we are, debating whether to scrap one before it has even opened.
The immediate cause is technical. Serious defects were found in key structural elements made of engineered wood, prompting a construction stop. Engineers are now assessing whether repairs are possible or whether dismantling is unavoidable. The opening has been postponed by years. Costs are uncertain. Responsibility is under review.
But the technical explanation is not the real explanation.
The deeper reason lies in how public projects are conceived today. Buildings are no longer designed primarily around function, robustness, and error tolerance. They are shaped by a dense web of requirements: sustainability targets, CO₂ calculations, innovation incentives, procurement law, liability management, and political signaling. None of these aims are wrong in themselves. Most arise from good intentions.
This is where the paradox emerges.
When everything must be optimized, documented, justified, and symbolically charged, simplicity becomes nearly impossible. Nobody is rewarded for proposing a boring, overengineered sports hall that will quietly last fifty years. People are rewarded for innovation, for visible sustainability, for projects that demonstrate alignment with contemporary values.
The result is not resilience, but fragility. Responsibility fragments across planners, engineers, contractors, consultants, insurers, and lawyers. Everyone fulfills their contractual role correctly. Every box is checked. And yet no one truly owns the building as a whole. Liability is managed. Judgment is diluted.
The irony is hard to miss. In trying to do everything right, we create structures that tolerate error poorly. A single defect, a moisture problem, a production flaw, and the entire project stalls. What was meant to embody sustainability becomes waste.
The fact that demolition is now being discussed sharpens the point. If sustainability were measured by outcomes rather than intentions, the verdict would be clear. A building that must be rebuilt is not sustainable, no matter how virtuous the concepts behind it may have been.
This sports hall is therefore not just a construction problem. It is a symptom.
We see the same pattern elsewhere: in education systems overloaded with good intentions that lose sight of learning itself; in media landscapes saturated with moral framing but thin on explanation; in politics where procedures are impeccable but results disappoint.
We increasingly replace function with meaning. And then we are surprised when the function fails.
The people of this town did not ask for a sustainability manifesto or an architectural statement. They wanted a place where children could move, where schools and clubs could train, where everyday life could continue.
Perhaps the lesson is simple and uncomfortable: doing the right thing begins with making sure that basic things actually work.
A sports hall that stands and is used is more sustainable than one that perfectly embodies every virtue on paper but has to be built twice.