Chisinau Tennis Arena

Alla Krichenko graduated from the Architecture Institute in Moscow in 1961 and was assigned to Chișinău, where she spent her entire career working with Semyon Shoikhet on urban planning and building design. The Tennis Arena in Aluneluî Park, completed in 1968, was among their collaborations. The building is dominated by an arched roof structure, with horizontal ribs running across the front facade and floor-to-ceiling windows along the sides that flood the interior with light. A rectangular volume attached to the left side houses a hall, a small cafeteria, two indoor courts, and recovery spaces, with several outdoor clay courts adjacent. At the time of completion the complex was on par with the most competitive tennis facilities in the USSR, and in the early 1970s it produced a team of world-class players. During the 1990s the clay courts were converted into shopping areas and ice-skating rinks. Aluneluî Park was designed by the Moldgiprostroy Institute's urban planning department as a leisure area for the inhabitants of the Buiucani district. A rectangular fountain at the centre of the park connects to the surrounding streets via a broad stairway leading up to the arena. The area now occupied by the arena and the park overlaps with part of the old Jewish cemetery that existed before the interwar structural changes to the district. A memorial to the victims of the 1903 pogrom, sculpted by N. Epelbaum and completed in 1993, was installed in the park as a record of what the site had been.