St Mary’s Hall – Multi Purpose Event Centre
St. Mary’s Hall, located in Athlone, is an old workhouse constructed in 1839 that was used to accommodate paupers. In more recent times it has been used as a youth Centre to facilitate clubs for young teens. The project aim is to utilise the potential of the space in this place, to allow for more unique functions and events to the hosted within it and to cater for more members of the community. The intention of the redesign is to bring it into a more modern finish; it will be renovated into a multi-purpose event hall with additional facilities to allow for daily use. With a Co-working space that can be rented, to a new cafe located at the back entrance, this brings in daily use to a mostly abandoned building. Wanting to keep the aspects of youth interaction within the building, new digital features were added to facilitate this, with an arcade located beside the event hall where small local events can be hosted, and new digital artist studios located on the top floor. Artists can rent out these spaces to work on their own projects and then project their work onto the large digital screen that spans the whole length of the void located within the cafe and reception space that adjoins the entrance to the event hall and tiered theatre.
