Sligo Regional Sports Centre

The sports centre design is crafted to foster interaction and community engagement, combining thoughtful architectural elements with its natural surroundings. The exterior features a rippled wooden façade, which serves not only to limit direct sunlight and glare into the basketball court and swimming pool but also to help the building blend and soften into the landscape. The use of natural wood and the undulating design harmonise the structure with its environment, reducing its visual impact as it sits on the edge of a small hill. This hill is cleverly utilised to conceal the large interior volumes required for the courts and pool, making the building feel less imposing and more integrated into the terrain. A key element of the design is the creation of paths that cross and connect various parts of the building, encouraging the interaction of different groups who use the centre. These paths facilitate movement between spaces, such as the café, galleries, and sports areas, allowing for casual encounters and a sense of shared experience among visitors. The sloped seating area offers views over the football pitch, extending beyond to the mountains and river, enhancing the connection between the building’s users and the landscape. Meanwhile, the galleries that extend from the café provide ideal vantage points for observing the activities taking place within the centre. This design prioritises not only functionality but also social interaction, transforming the sports centre into a vibrant hub where the community can come together, interact, and engage with both sport and nature.

Soccer Stadium

For a person who can’t even play football, a soccer stadium might seem like a strange choice of programme for a thesis. But when I began the project at the start of 1992, following an initial semester of group work focused on the “western gateway” to the city, around Heuston Station, the country was still basking in the glory of our exploits at Italia ’90. Most of all, a stadium seemed to me to be a valid vehicle – a large building, full of people – for the pursuit of a thesis on architecture.

I could concentrate on structure and space, physical context and topography, while at the same time, perhaps indirectly, invoking history, urbanism and society. The site, roughly in the original location of St. James’ Gate, occupies the east-facing slope leading down from the Royal Hospital Kilmainham to Dr. Steeven’s Hospital [both C17th buildings] and the entrance to Heuston Station.

Most stadia are approximately symmetrical, but the sloping site presented me with an unavoidably asymmetrical stadium. Looking for a reference for this, I started with the 12 stadia built specifically for Italia ’90 – in the end I found a stadium outside Madrid called “la Peineta” by Cruz y Ortiz. This is a large concrete plate on one side, to provide seating, supported on three concentric concrete walls below.

I adapted this idea to the St. James’ site, the concentric walls directing traffic in from the main road into an underground car-park. Above this internal “road”, the top-lit “canyon” formed between the concrete walls and the hillside contained all of the changing rooms and hospitality functions. The main body of seating sat on top of the walls [as per Cruz y Ortiz], fed by staircases from below, and covered by a large roof following the angle of the slope and supported by an 80-metre arched truss, spanning from north to south ends.

At the eastern side of the site, an open-to-air smaller tribune, provides seating facing west. Behind this, a covered coach-park and main pedestrian access, appears from above as a landscape of varied smaller roof forms, like scattered leaves. Total capacity is 65,000 seats.

Harmonic Registration

Music and Architecture are often compared in loosely aesthetic ways, making connections between the nature of composition in both fields, but this analogy serves a purely philosophical end. This thesis aims to bring back the diminishing world of harmony, proportion and order to architecture through a retelling of the musical analogy and a new definition that prioritises tangible experience of such harmonies.

The thesis tracked the history of harmonics to its recent decline and considered ways that we could think about harmony that begin with human optics and mentalities, rather than it’s divine origin.

The universal ideas put forward here have been manifested in a new GAA club for the town of Mountbellew in Co. Galway. Harmony can exist anywhere once there has been proper consideration for a building’s parts, systems and their interrelationships.

In this field in Galway, downpipes and expansion joints become classical colonnades, and plasterboard, pvc and linoleum are all used to make a beautiful place that from time to time will spark a sense of harmony in its users.