In the decade since the Olympics, a procession of academic and cultural institutions have headed out that way, to establish “East”- labelled offshoots along the banks of the River Lea. The new East Bank cluster has been seized on as a rare opportunity to break the bounds of constrained central London heritage sites, and to create spaces purpose-designed for 21st century work and life, but also for a future economy and climate that is rapidly changing and hard to predict.
The newest arrival is UCL East, the first phase of the biggest expansion in the university’s 200-year history. Today, its two new buildings – Stanton Williams’ Marshgate and One Pool Street by Lifschutz Davidson Sandilands – stand sentinel over the river, in front of the former Olympic stadium and London Aquatics Centre. Built for an initial 4,000 students, eventually they will be part of a 180,000m2 campus for many more.
Their shared DNA is the East Bank design code set out by Allies and Morrison, which has steered architects towards masonry buildings inspired by the site’s industrial roots. However, the teams at UCL have applied this in very different ways …
Marshgate
With 35,000m2 of teaching, research and collaboration space over eight floors, Marshgate is UCL’s largest single building. It will house academics in fields ranging from the creative industries to robotics, green technologies and global health. “The building is like a university in itself,” says Gavin Henderson, director of Stanton Williams.
From the outside, it appears immense and enclosed, like a vast cabinet beautifully crafted from sand-coloured concrete – a point of stillness next to the tangled chaos of Anish Kapoor’s Orbit sculpture.The double-height ground level is in-situ concrete, with pronounced boardmarking on the main facades and acid-etched entrance reveals. Above, the treatment changes to huge precast panels and vertical fins, finished with a bush- hammered effect.
A grand entrance on each elevation, framed in weathered metal, beckons people inside. The idea is for these to remain wide open for much of the year, extending the public realm that stretches down to the waterfront. Anyone can walk inside, through the double-height streets to the central atrium, with its cafe and community rooms interspersed with futuristic-sounding workshops and maker spaces.
The spaces above are open to the atrium too, becoming progressively more private and specialist as the building rises. The gentle buzz of up to 2,500 people working, researching and grappling with the challenges of the future will cascade to the public arena below. Natural lighting and ventilation will add to the sense that this is simply a piece of the city brought inside.
UCL describes the ground floor as the “fluid zone”, and this sense of spaces spilling into one another continues above. Most areas are cross-disciplinary and Stanton Williams has arranged the accommodation into a series of horseshoe-shaped “neighbourhoods”, around their own double-height collaboration space (see right).
The main structure is based around a 9m x 9m grid and 300mm- deep flat slabs. “It’s a flat slab building, which remains the most adaptable form of construction,” says Henderson. “We have made as much use of the concrete as possible. There are no additional finishes: the structure is the architecture.” The in-situ frame uses a 40% GGBS mix and the piling 70%, averaging out at about 50%.
The regularity of the structure is celebrated in the rhythms of the architecture: all of the smooth, cylindrical columns share the same 1.2m diameter, and three tie holes run down the centre of each cast panel, like suit buttons. The holes are all precisely 8mm deep: “We had someone whose job it was for a year to make the plugs for the tie holes,” says Kevin Kilcoyne, project director for contractor Mace.
The plywood formwork, used throughout the interiors, was similarly exacting and had to be rigorously checked for screw holes and other imperfections. Stanton Williams wanted all corners to turn sharply, so no fillets could be used to soften the edges of the formwork.
Much of the skilled carpentry that this required took place in an on-site factory, a huge 80m x 20m tent set up to provide safe, controlled working conditions at the height of the pandemic. Ironically, the only walls to show evidence of boardmarking needed no carpentry at all. The double- height areas around the atrium were formed using GRP liners moulded from just six different planks selected by the architect. This, Kilcoyne says, was to minimise the use of timber and to maintain a high level of consistency.
These walls were actually the last elements to be cast, as Mace wanted to take them off the critical path due to their bespoke finish. Because the concrete here has a light brown pigment, the batching plant also needed cleaning after each pour. The only way to work this into the programme was to go back and pump down through the level-two slab, says Kilcoyne. “We bolted huge shutters through the slab and poured the self-compacting concrete through a hole in the slab, like a letterbox.”
Around the atrium, the services are either embedded or recessed, reinforcing the sense of calm and order. The labs on the upper levels, however, reveal how much work the building is doing. Here, huge arrays of exposed services are suspended from the ceilings to be hooked up to cutting-edge equipment. All services have been designed with demand control and for future adaptability.
Externally, the building subtly announces its public status through its use of finishes, which reference both the National Theatre and the Barbican. Like the boardmarking of the double- height ground level, the bush-hammered effect above was created using rubber moulds, this time for precast concrete panels. The bush- hammering derives from an unlikely source material: “One of the precast operatives took some of the gravel used for soakage in the French drain outside the factory,” explains Kilcoyne. “He set up a panel with it, and that’s how it started life.”
The texture becomes less pronounced as the building rises, and the colour lightens too, from a browner tone to a Portland stone finish on the upper levels. The intended effect, Henderson says, is of the building emerging from the riverbed. The precast vertical fins are also subtly thinner higher up and are individually oriented to control solar gain – part of a passive design strategy that also exploits the thermal mass of the structure to reduce the energy load.
The facade units, which were delivered to site in various configurations, are bolted to upstands on the slab perimeter. Henderson points out that this is a more permanent solution than lightweight cladding – a reflection of the fact that Marshgate has been designed for a life measured in centuries rather than decades.
The whole-life carbon calculation for stages A-C, which is based on a shorter 60-year lifespan, was measured at 970kgCO eq/m2. UCL is aiming for the all-electric building to be net-zero in operation by 2035.
One Pool Street
“You see the form of the building very clearly from afar,” says Douglas Inglis, director of Lifschutz Davidson Sandilands. “But as you get closer, it starts to reveal more. There are lots of surprises and lots of detail.” Like Marshgate, One Pool Street is wrapped in panels of precast concrete, but to very different effect. Crisp dark-grey spandrels mark out the podium building, while curving white balcony-like projections define each floor of the 12- and 16-storey towers above.
Closer inspection reveals repeated patterns cast into the panels: lozenge shapes running like a hem along the upper ground and first floors, recessed discs on the underside of the projections, a sawtooth profile to the central circulation core, complete with an imprint following the route of the stairs. “‘Precast concrete is an inherently homogeneous material which allowed us to introduce a lot of detailing at no additional cost,” says Inglis.
One Pool Street shares the cross-disciplinary approach of Marshgate, but if anything has an even more diverse range of functions, housing everything from robotics labs to beehives. The towers contain 550 student bedrooms, while the three-storey podium below provides 5,000m2 of academic space, a cinema and a public atrium with a shop and cafe. “It was a big brief,” says Inglis. “But when you look at it from the outside, it doesn’t necessarily strike you as a big building.”
The precast detailing plays a part in breaking down the mass, allowing the building to act as a bridge between the solid masonry forms of the East Bank and the glass skyline of the Stratford International Quarter behind. The vertical sawtooth pattern emphasises the height and slenderness of the towers, while the facades are a grid of discrete components, with white grooved posts and sills, dark-grey spandrels and full-width glazing. (These were manufactured as two-bay units, 5m x 3.5m, with glazing pre-installed.)
As with Marshgate, the idea of a “fluid zone”, ushering the public in to a space that they might assume was private, was a key part of the UCL brief. However, LDS has approached it differently, using the white concrete of the central core to signal the glazed entrance beneath. “We want everybody to come through the front door,” says Inglis. “Whether it’s the public, whether it’s students living above or whether it’s the academics, we want everybody to come into the atrium and then make their way up through the building.”
It was important to make the atrium warm and welcoming, says Inglis. Swaths of exposed concrete structure have been used as “a soft canvas” for richer finishes including colourful furniture and rubber flooring and European oak panelling. The concrete is light grey, achieved with limestone aggregate and a 25% GGBS mix, with LDS’s own JW3 Jewish centre in north London used as a benchmark.
The board layouts were designed by the architects to align with columns and the grid and an MDO formwork system was used. The concrete was left almost as-struck, finished with just a light sand and dust sealant. “We didn’t want it to be too perfect. We like concrete that looks like concrete.”
While most of the podium is on a 5.5m x 5.5m grid, forming a solid base to the towers, in the atrium this extends to 13m x 8m to help make the space as flexible as possible for future uses. The slabs here were post-tensioned to maintain a slim 225mm depth. The floor build-up also includes a 600mm void above the slab that draws fresh air into a displacement ventilation system.
The towers are built with more conventional flat slabs, 200mm deep. A lot of the containment for lighting and fire alarm systems was cast into the concrete, which meant that the soffits could be exposed without services attached. This allowed for an unusual expanseb of visible concrete in the student rooms, which tends to look cluttered and oppressive unless cabling and ductwork can be concealed.
The concrete works in tandem with windows, fully openable behind vertical fins, to maximise natural ventilation. The concrete’s thermal mass moderates internal temperatures during the day and is purged at night, either through the windows (the shallow building form also enables cross-ventilation) or through the MVHR units installed behind bulkheads in each room.
This is part of a strategy that used 2050 climate models to mitigate against overheating and future- proof the building. The other main expression of this is the white precast projections that form a ring around each floor. These extend to a depth of 1m on the west and south elevations, limiting solar gain while allowing sufficient glazing to make the 10.5m2 bedrooms feel light and spacious.
The articulated facade is also designed to break down the prevailing westerly winds as they sweep uninterrupted across the park. As soon as the wind hits the facade, it breaks the pattern, virtually eliminating the tunnel effect at ground level. The projection is shallower on the more shaded and sheltered east and north ventilations and dips inwards at the central core to draw light into the lift lobbies and help demarcate the entrance.
The multistorey wind break should help to make the outdoor areas pleasant spaces to spend time. These include a 1,200m2 terrace on top of the podium and a separate roof area above the small adjoining service building. The hope is that these will provide both places to relax and an outdoor lab with biodiverse habitats for scientists to study. The student towers at One Pool Street are rated BREEAM Excellent and the education facilities are rated Outstanding (design stage).