Lifschutz Davidson Sandilands, along with engineers Atelier 10, AKT II and Kim Wilkie Landscape have won the competition to design Pool Street, a 16,500m2 mixed-use facility comprising of university residential and academic space, located on the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, just south of the London Aquatics Centre.

UCL is investing £270 million in UCL East as part of a £1.2 billion programme to expand and upgrade its facilities, including its historic Bloomsbury campus. The first phase of UCL East is expected to accommodate up to 3,000 students and 625 staff, including academics and researchers and LDS’s win runs in parallel with Marshgate, a purely academic facility on an adjacent site, won by Stanton Williams.

Part of the UCL East masterplan, the Pool Street proposal navigates a complex set of constraints ranging from PLUG tunnels directly under the site to complex townscape and access issues with a structurally muscular, yet efficient solution. In line with the requirements of the masterplan, the scheme visually separates the residential and academic elements but makes the most of their complementary uses to create a vibrant centre, active day and night.

The competition required an approach to the site rather than a developed building design and we are very much looking forward to working with UCL and all the other stakeholders over the coming months to develop our ideas into a building that is a great success for UCL and the new campus in Stratford.

Alex Lifschutz commented:

“This is a fascinating project for a building that combines many uses – residential, academic and out-of-term-time convention and conferences. We very much wish it also to become a place that local people visit and enjoy, to make contact with UCL and to engage in many inspiring conversations.

We hope that this building together with its neighbour on the Queen Elizabeth Park are as much of a catalyst for this new campus as the Wilkins Building on Gower Street was for this most prestigious university in 1825.”

Martin Summersgill, Head of Development for UCL East:

“We are delighted to award these design contracts marking a key milestone in the building of UCL East. We look working with both firms to design the new site which is envisaged as a radical new model of how a university campus can be embedded in the local community and with business”

UCL East will bring together cross-disciplinary UCL expertise in such areas as creativity and material culture, future global cities and experimental engineering. The first phase of the campus is expected to open during the 2019/2020 academic year.

The full team was Lifschutz Davidson Sandilands with Jackson Coles, Atelier 10, AKT II, Kim Wilkie, Light Bureau, People Friendly Design, London Communications Agency, Spaces that Work and PFB Construction Management.