St Catherine’s Foyer housing and training centre and community sports centre is a pilot project for Dublin City Council completed in 2004. The Foyer, Ireland's first such centre, consists of a 48 bed Foyer housing and training project to provide accommodation and training for young people aged 18-25 who are in housing need.

The living accommodation is grouped around a south facing courtyard and provides 8 cluster groups of 6 study bedrooms with their own shared kitchen and dining facilities, with communal rooms and classrooms for training on the ground floor.

The Community sports centre is a popular venue for sports and social activities in this new Digital Hub area. The sports hall is a steel framed structure clad in translucent glass cladding with the scale broken down by smaller brick structures along the street front, housing the gym and ancillary spaces. There is a shared entrance drum structure on Marrowbone Lane which gives a breathing space between the busy street and the heart of the buildings.

Bright colours are used throughout both buildings to add vigour to the friendly spaces created and to encourage as much social interaction as possible.

This project is designed as a non institutional building so that smaller numbers of residents living together can make the Foyer their home. The Foyer provides an important 'stepping stone to independence’ for young people.

Photos by Paul Tierney