Sporting gesture.

Gugulethu (meaning 'our pride' in Xhosa) is a sprawling township on the wind-swept Cape Flats outside Cape Town. This sports centre in Gugulethu was commissioned by the National Sports Congress as the first in a proposed series of cost-effective indoor sports centres to be built in townships throughout South Africa. The sports building programme is a response to a report published by the Community Agency for Social Enquiry (based at the University of Witwatersrand) which revealed that 60 per cent of the country's youth were active participants in one or more forms of sport. Yet although sport clearly has the potential to play an important part in youth development, there is an appalling dearth of facilities in most townships.

The new centre in Gugulethu has a twofold brief. Essentially it provides a much-needed sports facility for the township, but equally important is the notion that the centre can support youth development through sporting activities. In this way, the building embraces both sporting and community needs.

The centre is set in a sports field surrounded by mainly single-storey houses. The dominant element of the new building is a large multi-use hall, which can accommodate 12 different kinds of sporting activities, from table-tennis to basketball, supported by the usual changing and ablutionary facilities. There are also committee rooms, meeting areas and general social spaces. The ancillary accommodation is wrapped around the main volume of the sports hall, reducing the scale of the overall composition and articulating the elevations. Tiers of seating running along edges of the sports hall register externally as corrugations on the side walls. The large, barrel-vaulted volume of the hall is fully revealed on the north elevation, creating a sense of civic presence.

In common with his other projects for South Africa's townships (AR July 1994 and March 1995) Jo Noero's latest building embodies a culturally neutral yet strangely poetic functionalism. Despite their apparent simplicity, materials and detailing have a robustly ascetic refinement. The steel-framed structure is infilled with different materials, including concrete blocks and plywood. The process of construction is didactically revealed through the assembly of materials and their relationship to the steel frame.

The centre was constructed by a firm of local builders who entered into a joint-venture partnership with a prominent Cape Town based contractor. The contractor undertook to train workmen on site as well as transfer management skills to an individual seconded by the community as building manager.

The centre is run by a committee drawn from the community and is managed by a full-time sports and community development officer. Typical projects include sports programmes as well as educational and life skills development, but since it is the only facility of its kind on the Cape Flats, it is hugely over-subscribed. Its uplifting influence is also a drop in the ocean - it is envisaged that an additional seven centres need to be built during the next three years to deal with the pressures in the area.