St Catherines Foyer and Community Sports Centre

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.