Dafne Wiegers

Home of Legends

Home of Legends is an eSports hub in the heart of London, designed for Fnatic. Fnatic is one of the most storied eSports organisations in Europe, succeeding in being about far more than just gaming. Home of Legends houses Fnatic’s League of Legends team and headquarters. Home of Legends offers spaces for the professional players to train, eat, come together and sleep, and the building can also be visited by fans.

In this building, spaces for professional players on the one hand, and spaces for fans on the other hand, are intertwined like a Sundae ice-cream. Fans visiting the building are on a constant quest to find out where their heroes are, and may (or may not) find them. Because where is the entrance? And how do you get to the next level? What is behind that wall?

Like many games, the building is Free to Play, providing an open space with a roof garden for the city, while at the same time guaranteeing a business model. There are already enough temporary game installations, this is the first permanent monument.

The structure is designed like a series of scenes the visitor can explore, in stead of starting from a series of floor plans like traditional architecture. This results in a fragmented building. In the Home of Legends building, there is no route. You can enter in a lot of places, and follow different paths up and down. This temple of gaming is fragmented like the internet is fragmented: you’ll have to find your way through it.

Moreover, Home of legends is an investigation of how our physical habitat will look if the digital habitat is becoming more and more influential, and we spend more time submerged in it. I think the digitalisation of our lives is a revolution as important for architects as was the housing development with the industrial revolution, the social turnaround of the sixties and the crave for sustainability in the nineties and zeroes.

More information: https://www.onlinebouwers.nl/dafne/homeoflegends.pdf

Commission members: Machiel Spaan (mentor), Ira Koers, Kamiel Klaasse. Additional members for the exam: Bart Bulter, Miquel Loos.