St. David's Performance Center

Saint David’s Performance Center is the training home for the Austin Football Club (FC) first team and its academy team. It was the first Major League Soccer (MLS) facility to anchor a larger mixed-use development featuring office buildings, entertainment, hospitality, public gathering places and recreation. The Performance Center is the result of a partnership between Austin FC and St. David’s Health Care which provides Austin FC players with medical expertise, high performance training, nutrition, and physiotherapy.

The facility sits on a 23-acre site with four and half professional outdoor soccer fields. It houses soccer operation and technical staff for both teams and provides classrooms, dinning and player lounge, an auditorium, locker rooms, two hydrotherapy pools, a sports performance area, and a weight room. The initial 30,000-square-foot facility includes individual spaces for each team, and the site is designed to accommodate future expansion.

Walter P Moore worked with the architect to develop a cost-effective but architecturally interesting structure. The facility is composed of prefabricated metal buildings, however instead of using a typical shape, we developed a layout that combined five buildings which were individually rotated to achieve the architect’s vision. We then tied these buildings together to create a single roof structure as this was more cost effective then leaving them as five separate buildings. We also developed a non-traditional cladding solution which allowed the structural elements to be expressed on both the interior and exterior of the facility.

Even though this was a fairly small project, Walter P Moore delivered it out of two offices which proved to be very helpful during the 2020 COVID pandemic. Our Los Angeles office ran the project due to their proximity to the architect’s office, but we also used our Austin team due to their experience with local conditions throughout design and construction. This became particularly valuable during construction as travel restrictions were in place throughout the entire phase. Since our Austin team had already been fully engaged in the project, they were able to complete all of the necessary site visits without missing a beat.