hyrox by the sea
an open air training club for egypt's north coast
concept sprint · 2026

question,what happens to a hyrox facility when you take the box away?

every one of them in the world is a dark room. black rubber underfoot, industrial ceiling overhead, no daylight and no view. that is a hamburg warehouse answer and it is a good one in hamburg. on a coastline it stops working. the floor reaches sixty degrees by midday, and the two things that make the north coast worth building on at all, the light and the sea, are the exact two things the typology is designed to shut out.

so the question was not whether the format could go outside. it was what would have to change if it did.

direction, the whole scheme came out of one number.

at half past six on a july evening the sun here sits at roughly eighteen degrees above the horizon. almost flat. a roof shades nothing at that angle, because the light arrives sideways and travels underneath it. the only device that does any work against a low sun is a vertical blade. so the shading device stopped being a component and became the building.

a continuous screen of slender champagne anodised fins wraps all four sides. four point two metres tall, at four hundred and fifty millimetre centres, roughly half air. it cuts the low sun without closing the plan. from outside it reads as a single quiet line on the dune. from inside it reads as a horizon rather than a wall, and it stripes the track with hard shadow that moves as you run through it.

the roof is the commercial argument. a solid surface on a dune is a sail, and engineering it against uplift is where a coastal budget disappears. so it is not solid. nine hundred millimetre fabric bands at one point two metre centres, with three hundred millimetre gaps between them. wind passes through instead of lifting. the ceiling glows instead of going dark.

the plan is one move. a continuous running loop hugs the perimeter inside the fins, four and a half metres wide, two hundred metres at the centreline, five laps to the kilometre. nothing crosses it at any point, which is the single rule the entire layout is organised around. every station sits inboard of it. the ergs face north to the sea, so the hardest part of the session is the part with the view. burpee lanes to the west, sled lanes to the east, and in the middle a raised timber deck with benches and one stainless trough, which is the part people will actually remember.

everything bolts. screw piles, no slab, no welding. up in may, into a container in october. that is the honest answer to a four month season, and it is the reason an operator could finance it.

palette, champagne anodised aluminium for the fins, marine specification. ecru pvdf membrane for the roof bands, translucent enough to glow at the end of the day. sand toned epdm for the track and the court, thermally modified ash for every surface you touch, sand tone tadelakt in the changing cores, and 316 stainless throughout because anything less does not survive salt.

the architecture is champagne. the equipment is black, official, bought rather than fabricated. there is no green anywhere in the scheme except the handles on the machines. the whole palette is the dune with one metal in it.

feeling, a lido more than a gym.

at midday it is hard and graphic. the fins throw a striped shadow across the track and you move in and out of it as you run. by half past six the same fins have turned the low sun into a band of gold along the west edge, the membrane overhead has gone warm, and the sea is sitting flat at the end of every erg. you finish a lap looking at it.

it should feel like the sort of place you arrive at early and stay after.

outputs, site and shading strategy. spatial layout and track geometry. equipment planning and zoning. material specification. seasonal build and demount strategy. a full visual set in two registers, illustrated and photoreal.

it is a concept. but this is exactly how it would look and feel.

hyrox® is a registered trademark of upsolut sports ag. this is a speculative, self initiated design study by outofspaces®. it is not commissioned by, affiliated with or endorsed by hyrox, upsolut sports or any equipment manufacturer, and no trademarked logo or mark appears in any image.

© 2026 outofspaces®. all rights reserved. the design, layout, shading strategy, material system, imagery and text presented on this page are the original work and intellectual property of outofspaces®. no part may be reproduced, adapted, built or used commercially, in whole or in part, without written permission from the studio. enquiries to hello@outofspaces.com.

the eighteen degree solar altitude quoted here is an approximation pending verification against a sun path model for the specific latitude and date.