SEAN O’CASEY COMMUNITY CENTRE

SEAN O’CASEY COMMUNITY CENTRE

SEAN O’CASEY COMMUNITY CENTRE

The Sean O’Casey Community Centre is an award-winning building in the heart of Dublin’s north inner city East Wall area. As well as being a unique, modern addition to the old docklands district, it also functions as an essential social, sports and cultural hub for the whole community. The centre is a single-storey building with a floor plate of 2,500m² and a five-storey focal tower. It has four distinct ‘quadrants’ with separate facilities for various sections of the community, including day care facilities for the elderly, a crèche, a theatre, a sports hall and an outside FAI standard all-weather pitch.

Client : Dublin Docklands Development Authority
Service : Public sector
Architect : O'Donnell & Tuomey
Quantity Surveyor : Boyd Creed Swee
Structural Engineer : Casey O'Rourke
Services Engineer : Davis Associates
Value : €7 million

The building is renowned for its audacious appearance, towering over the East Wall rooftops. Its unique features include its circular windows of various sizes (from 650mm to 2,500mm in diameter), and walls of corrugated concrete, which was meticulously hand sanded to achieve the desired finish.

The concrete finish is continued inside; all internal soffits are exposed fair faced concrete, with most internal walls lined with timber. Extensive planning and coordination of the concrete pours was needed to line up plywood joints in the wall and soffit shutters with all the internal finishes.

The Architectural Review has praised the Sean O’Casey Community Centre’s “brilliant, disingenuous architectural idealism”, and the building won in the Building Category in the 2009 Irish Concrete Society Awards. It was also shortlisted for the Royal Institute of British Architects’ (RIBA) prestigious Lubetkin Prize for architecture.