Cathal Brugha St. - College of Catering - Exterior

Cathal Brugha Street, College of Catering DIT

1993-96 / €4.5M

Having decided to centralise activities in one location, the College of Catering at Cathal Brugha Street required an additional area of 4,000m2 of accommodation to provide a major new laboratory and teaching facility.

Designing the project involved lengthy discussions with staff, and extensive research into "state of the art" laboratory buildings worldwide from which the highly complex brief emerged . An extremely tight infill site (625m2) adjacent to the College was the only land available.

The resultant building is six storeys over basement, with a two-storey penthouse type space at roof level. The organisation is vertical, with common student areas at ground floor level, student resource facilities at first floor level and more specialist activities above.

The new building form is inspired by the overall urban setting: the immediate context presents a problem of street infill between large institutional buildings on one side and a terrace of buildings of a more domestic scale extending to the Pro-Cathedral on the other.

We have used the strong visual punctuation mark of the circulation and services tower of the new building as a watershed between one urban building type and another.

  • Accommodation
  • Laboratories:
    • Chemistry
    • Biology
    • Physics
    • Micro Biology
    • Research
    • Environment
    • Food processing and sensory analysis laboratory.
  • Specialist clean rooms
  • Classrooms
  • Student facilities.
  • Beverage technology laboratory.