SCABAL, with Urban Space Management (USM) and The Furness Partnership, have designed an innovative Sports Hall for Dunraven School that is based on a unique, affordable and sustainable new method of construction. Using sea containers to create the building’s envelope, we are providing a Sports Hall and multi-purpose Community facility that gives the school the best indoor sporting environment they could wish for and answers their desire for it to be “so much more than a boring shed”. The building includes galleries at first floor level which overlook the hall on three sides just like an Elizabethan theatre. This novel approach, defined by using sea containers as both structure and internal accommodation, (they also house the changing rooms) allows for extremely simple and cost effective building, whilst capturing the excitement of sports appropriate for a school. The corrugated steel sides of the containers are familiar to most people and they provide robust and attractive elevations when assembled as buildings. In themselves the aesthetic of the containers is industrial, but with the Hall at Dunraven School we have designed windows that subtly undermine this using an immediately recognizable architectural motif, in this case the greenhouse - something that might be found in any suburban garden. This glazing allows glimpses of sport activity in the Hall and connects the building with the outside – something too often lacking with the ubiquitous brick box type Sports Hall. The lit-up windows also animate the Hall at night, after school hours, when it can become available for Community use either as a sports facility or a multi-purpose hall. At Dunraven School, the north elevation is comprised of polycarbonate panels and part glazing that will allow the building to glow at night on its street frontage, and the introduction of natural daylight will allow it to have uses beyond sport by day, for example for exams, assemblies and events. The arrangement of the glazed and translucent panels is carefully organised to make sure sunlight does not affect the sports use of the Hall.