St Catherines Foyer and Community Sports Centre
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View from Marrowbone Lane at dusk
Paul Tierney (website) Download Original
Community sports centre with residential accommodation and training facilities for young people
The new community enterprise consists of a 50-bed Foyer providing accommodation and training to young people in housing need and a sports and leisure centre for the local community in the Liberties area of Dublin.
The Foyer, Ireland’s first such centre, is grouped around a south facing courtyard and provides eight cluster groups of six study bedrooms with their own shared kitchen and dining facilities with communal rooms and classrooms on the ground floor. Live-in wardens' flats are also provided.
Construction is a load-bearing cross wall structure with brick external shell and colour matched clay roof tiles. The bathroom towers are clad in Reglit glass cladding and the landscaped courtyard in self finished fibre cement slates.
The sports centre has an 18 x 36m flexible sports hall with associated gymnasium, health centre, childcare centre, function rooms and public cafe. The building is entered from a shared circular entrance courtyard giving a breathing space from the adjacent busy and narrow road. The sports hall box is steel framed and clad in translucent glass cladding and the scale is broken down by smaller brick structures along the street front housing the gym and ancillary spaces.
Data
- Completed: Jun 2003
- Floor area: 336m2
- Sectors: Sports and leisure, Residential, Education
- Total cost: £10M
- Funding: Dublin City Council/Grant funding
- Procurement: Traditional
- Address: St Catherine’s Foyer and Community Sports Centre, Marrowbone Lane, Liberties, Dublin, Ireland
Professional Team 
- Architect: Brady Mallalieu Architects
- Project architect: Rickie Chambers
- Client: Cara Ireland Housing Association, St Catherine’s Community Group, Dublin City Council
- Structural engineer: White Young Green
- Planning supervisor: White Young Green
- Quantity surveyor: Davis Langdon PKS
- Main contractor: Bowen Construction
- M&E consultant: Homan O'Brien Associates
Suppliers
- Brickwork: Ibstock Brick Ltd
- Roof tiles: Sandtoft
- Windows: Velfac
- Glass planks: Reglit
- Zinc roofing and cladding: Armaseam
- Mineral Fibre cladding: Marley Eternit
- Lifts: Schindler
- Structural steelwork: Shirley Engineering
- Architectural steelwork: O'Carroll Engineering
- Timber floors: Junckers
- Glass floors: Luxcrete
- Ironmongery: Doorplan
- Green roof: Grodan
- Commercial kitchen: Masser Hammond
- Bespoke joinery: Ross Furniture Limited
- Shower pods: Taplanes
- External paving: Marshalls Street Furniture
- Turnstiles: Gunnebo
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