New sports hall at the ABC Braník sports centre, building permit design

Three outdoor tennis courts at a sports club in the Braník district of Prague were to be brought under a permanent roof. For PLA Architekti s.r.o. we produced the architectural and structural part of the building permit design for the new hall, which covers 1,620 m² of built-up area and rises 12.05 m to the ridge. The package covered four site plans, floor plans, sections, elevations and the written reports.

The ABC sports centre sits on a fenced site in a green part of Braník, between a city trunk road and the Kunratický brook. Next to the clubhouse are tennis courts and two volleyball pitches that are covered by an air dome over the winter. The owner, the TJ ABC Braník sports club, wanted three of the outdoor courts under a permanent roof, with the new hall linked to the existing building. Our client was PLA Architekti s.r.o., the practice responsible for the documentation and for the authorised architect's stamp. We delivered the architectural and structural part of it: the site plans, the building drawings and the written reports at the building permit stage, which in Czech practice is the design submitted to obtain consent to build.

The hall is a single storey prefabricated steel structure with a pitched roof at a 1:8 slope. Nine transverse frames carry the building, the columns are paired C 390x150x57 sections and the roof rests on lattice trusses with thin walled Z purlins. Walls and roof are clad in sandwich panels with a 120 mm PIR core. The ridge sits 12.05 m above datum, the eaves 10.10 m, and the clear internal height works out at roughly 9 m, which is the dimension that decides whether a tennis hall is usable at all. Daylight and natural ventilation come from four top hung windows facing each other in the long walls, while the playing surface is lit artificially. The drawings were generated from a Revit model. Levels of the existing building and the positions of the mature trees along the fence were read off a coloured point cloud of the site.

The complete submission package was handed over in April 2026: three written reports and ten drawings. The reports describe the building, its connection to the services, the way rainwater is handled on site and compliance with the Czech building requirements decree. The drawing set holds four site plans at 1:1000 and 1:300 and six building drawings at 1:100. A plan marking the position and trunk diameters of the trees followed in May as background for the arboricultural assessment, and a corrected set of site plans in June. According to the project report, construction is planned to run from August 2026 to August 2028. A building permit design does not replace the construction stage documentation, which is produced later.

Project challenges

The hall was never meant to stand on its own. It had to connect to the existing clubhouse, borrow its changing rooms and sanitary facilities, and still satisfy the fire safety requirements where the two buildings meet. Two versions of the link corridor were therefore modelled and compared, and the floor levels of the existing building were taken from the point cloud. The second issue is the position on the plot. The design leaves 0.90 m to the neighbouring boundary where 2.0 m is required, so the scheme needs a formal exemption. The third is water. The hall has no internal water supply and no drainage, yet it presents roughly 1,660 m² of roof whose runoff has to soak away on the owner's own land, which is why the design includes a soakaway with a retention volume of at least 35 m³. On top of that, mature trees stand where the hall is to go, and an arboricultural assessment had to be requested.

Project outputs

• Project report, part A of the documentation
• Summary technical report, part B of the documentation
• Technical report for the architectural and structural design, part D.1.1.1
• Wider context site plan and cadastral plan at 1:1000
• Coordination site plan and a plan of the City of Prague land holdings at 1:300
• Ground floor plan and roof plan at 1:100
• Two sections and four elevations at 1:100
• Building drawings in DWG and PDF issued as background to the other design disciplines
• A plan marking the position and trunk diameters of the trees for the arboricultural assessment
• The Revit model the drawings are generated from