← UCL Pool Street East← UCL Pool Street East

Pool Street East is a meanwhile project for University College London (UCL) that will transport a modular lab building from Bloomsbury to the growing UCL East campus in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. A ‘mini-campus’ of a variety of new labs will surround the relocated lab building on a site in the UCL East Masterplan, providing key lab space in the ten years before the phase of the masterplan zoned for the site comes forward.

In addition to the materials labs provided by the Modular Lab, a Bee Lab, as well as two vertical farm units and a greenhouse for UCL’s Life Sciences department, make up the Pool Street East mini-campus.

We have developed a common language across these disparate uses and construction types through the use of colour drenching. The colour yellow wraps both the site and the individual buildings, all of which are pre-fabricated or self-contained units. An aluminium expanded mesh provides the outer layer of this system, wrapping both the relocated lab and the site perimeter, further unified by a rigid horizontal and vertical grid.

The project aims to bring vitality and interest to this meanwhile project, both to those who will research, teach, and learn in the mini-campus and members of the public who will use the public spaces around Pool Street East and the Olympic Park. We are collaborating with UCL’s Bio-Integrated Design, a cross-departmental group and Master’s programme, based locally at HereEast, who are developing an experimental façade typology. This will form part of the perimeter around the site, which engages the public with UCL’s academic vision and provides a platform for art, landscape, and gardens, co-designed with local community groups.

Inspired by the research that goes on inside the site, the façade and fencing explore the idea of ‘cellular structures’ and how they are represented in and interact with nature and people. It’s our goal that the mesh that we use to wrap the buildings and the site over time becomes itself wrapped in plants, research, and the creative outputs of local and UCL communities.