Cut the Pilatus Arena in Kriens through its short side and the whole idea fits in one drawing. At the bottom, a prefabricated concrete base holds the stands. Above it, eight main steel girders span the court for about 47 m, rest on concrete columns and run on almost 10 m past the arena volume. Along the long side, a cantilever about 6 m wide carries a glazed foyer that Sophie Marie Piccoli, in her espazium review of 16 October 2026, calls the städtische Balkon, the city balcony. The arena opened in October 2025 and the tower was finished in late summer 2026. Piccoli’s review is the reason to read it now.

I stand on the Hönggerberg ridge, and I read sections the way you read faces. This one is calm: every load has a clear path down. The 47 m back-span holds a reach of almost 10 m, and the foyer hangs over the forecourt like a landing platform on Cloud City, built to welcome crowds.

The bowl, the roof, the room

The court measures 46 × 47 m. Espazium counts 1,300 fixed and 2,700 flexible seats, so about 4,000 spectators. The concrete base also carries the foyer level and a large green roof with PV. Blick reports that retractable telescopic stands free the floor of two triple sports halls: a stadium on match nights, open sports-hall floor the rest of the time. The arena is built to Minergie-P-ECO.

Building-sense: On a match night, about 4,000 spectators arrive in one wave; on a training day, a fraction of that. A building running this programme would set its ventilation by the fixture list, not the clock, and keep that schedule readable over open BACnet or MQTT, so a local facilities tech can still adjust it after any vendor dashboard has gone.

The tower beside it

Next to the hall rises the Pilatus Tower: 113 m and 36 storeys, per espazium the tallest building in canton Lucerne and, with the tallest Three-Point-Tower in Dübendorf, Switzerland’s highest residential high-rise. Giuliani Hönger Architekten, who won the competition in 2017 according to espazium, gave it polygonal floor plates that follow the site while the rooms stay orthogonal, turned slightly against the base. Compact MOVEment units sit low; the largest flats sit at the top with 2.8 m ceilings. The windows come down to 40 cm above the floor, where a built-in bench doubles as fall protection: one element, two jobs, the kind of rule PAZ has argued belongs inside the model, not the PDF.

Then comes the sentence that holds the project together. Piccoli writes: “Die Wohntürme und die Gewerbeflächen tragen die Kosten der Arena mit.” The housing towers and the commercial space help carry the cost of the arena. Per Halter, the construction volume is CHF 250 m, with 50,500 m² of gross floor area and 372 flats, 233 owner-occupied and 139 rented. The arena alone cost about CHF 55 m. Just as the back-span anchors the cantilever, the homes help carry the public hall. The trade-off is that a hall paid for this way depends on housing demand, so the cross-subsidy has to be written into the plan from the first sketch.

←TODAY: A Lucerne-region commune has a hall for about 4,000 co-financed by 372 homes and 113 m of tower. →3012: Public rooms are routinely carried by the density built beside them, and drawn that way. Fulcrum: Read the long span and the cross-subsidy as one section, and the arena stops being a cost and becomes a balance.

The people under the steel

None of this happens without the person who kept asking. Nick Christen, a former HC Kriens-Luzern player, coach and managing director, told Blick: «Wir mussten dreimal die Bau- und Zonenordnung ändern, zwei Abstimmungen gewinnen und unzählige Einsprachen überstehen.» Three zoning changes, two votes and countless objections over 18 years, alongside his co-visionary Toni Bucher. «99,9 Prozent haben mich am Anfang belächelt.» Halter, which developed the project with Eberli Sarnen and designed, engineered and built it, counts fifteen years of planning and about two years of construction for the arena. Markus Mettler, head of Halter Group, credited “the passion, prudence and professionalism of everyone involved.” Count among them the crews who set the precast stands and lifted eight girders into line.

Atelier: A Swiss office pitching a hall, school or pool to a commune this winter is selling a section, not just a programme. Monday move: put the residential or commercial GFA that co-finances the public room on the same competition sheet as the long-span section, so the jury reads cost and structure together.

Hack: Draw one long-span girder in Rhino with its back-span and cantilever, then read the overhang as a ratio before you place any columns. In GhPython with RhinoCommon, using the Kriens figures:

import Rhino.Geometry as rg
span, cant = 47.0, 10.0
girder = rg.Line(rg.Point3d(-cant,0,0), rg.Point3d(span,0,0))
ratio = cant / span   # ~0.21 of the span reaches out
print("overhang / span = %.2f" % ratio)

Change cant with a slider and watch the ratio rise: it tells you how much the back-span and its supports must hold. Piccoli’s verdict is that despite its size, the complex fits into the town without imposing itself. Open your next long-span model, draw the girder first, and let the ratio decide where the columns go.