Education \ Portal, Trinity College Dublin's Innovation Hub

Completed May 2025

The TTEC Innovation Hub – or ‘Portal’ forms the first step towards an eventual proposal to create a new innovation campus across the Trinity East site on the Corner of Pearse Street and Grand Canal Quay in Dublin.

This project envisages a new facility within the University to create an innovation hub – a home for new start-up businesses and entrepreneurs working in technology-based projects to come together in a single building which will create a place for innovation and cross fertilisation of ideas. These entrepreneurs may come from University Research projects or from the wider business community.

The project adapted and refurbished a Victorian industrial building located at no.4 Grand Canal Quay (the former Connaughton’s Warehouse) and the two smaller buildings connected to it.

Within these smaller buildings are a public facing café and beside this an exhibition and conference room, which creates an interface between these new businesses and ideas and the wider world. The intention is that the café can be a public place on Grand Canal quay, spilling onto the new external courtyard garden and providing a new vibrant meeting place adjacent to the water.

The existing building was a large rectangular stone walled and pitched roofed shed with an existing ground and lower ground floor level. Our strategy was to create an open and connected working environment in which the possibilities of interaction between different researchers and start-up companies is maximised.

The principal element of this strategy is the use of the large ground floor space of the warehouse as an open plan office space open to the existing wrought iron roof trusses above. At the east and west ends of this space we have introduced an additional mezzanine of floor space on an upper level tucked under the roof – which was raised by more than a metre as part of the refurbishment. At the west end of the building this contains open plan desks spaces; at the east end there is a large special meeting or board room for 20 people together with connection to the topmost office space in the small tower.

Along the south side of the space, against the party wall to the adjacent warehouse, we have created a double storey void, cutting away the floor slab along almost the full length of that side of the building to allow light to reach the lower floor level but also allowing visual connection to the spaces below.

Within this void we have created a series of cylindrical towers accessed by short bridges from the main floor. These towers a variety of private meeting rooms for one to eight people to hold a virtual meeting or make a private phone call without disturbing the wider open plan space. The top floors of these towers (at mezzanine floor level) are single open meeting spaces for groups of 6 people with individual steps down to the main floor level.

The open plan floor spaces are occupied by working desks which can be rented individually for hot desk working or in clusters for small groups to share. At the floor edges around the void and to the mezzanines we have designed further desks incorporated into the balustrade to allow people to work looking over the wider space. This is intended to be flexible and ever changing as part of the innovative workplace.

Within our client’s brief there was a requirement for a range of more enclosed working environments or ‘office pods’ together with some additional meeting spaces. Our strategy has been to place these rooms below the upper floors at ground and lower ground floor levels, thereby avoiding the problem of their roofs becoming dust traps as they would if placed in the larger volume. These rooms will have glass walls facing the main space to maintain a sense of connection with the wiser space.

The project enjoys the interaction between the existing materials of the warehouse – stone walls and metal roof trusses for instance - and the inserted elements of floors, balconies and meeting towers and uses colour and texture to highlight these insertions.

Patrick Prendergast, Provost and President of Trinity College Dublin said:
Trinity College Dublin is spearheading this national project to create an innovation district in the docklands of our capital city. Dublin already has an extraordinary cluster of technology and life science companies, but we now need to bring those companies closer together to create an enterprise culture that encourages entrepreneurs to create new companies that will either become world players themselves or be the basis for expansion of existing companies. This early activation centre will play a critical role in delivering on this vision.