East Village

Forming part of the Lend Lease Framework Team, Piercy&Company collaborated with Glenn Howells Architects on this residential plot within the Athletes Village for the London 2012 Olympics.

Piercy&Company’s façade design wraps a residential block designed to provide accommodation for 268 Athletes. Generous classical proportions and refined art deco detailing produce a celebratory and commemorative façade fit for the Games.

Richly patterned, the design was inspired by The Running Man, Eadweard Muybridge’s photographic investigations into human movement. An abstracted linear pattern, strongly expressive of motion, was then cast into Portland concrete and picked out in contrasting glazed brick tiles.

The design remains appropriate for the high quality, post-Olympic legacy scheme of eight townhouses and 32 apartments, with the façade pattern used to identify the two typologies. A human scale application of the technique features on the first three floors of the townhouses, while an enlarged glazed brick version marks the transition to apartments on the upper levels.

The building’s skin achieves the demanding thermal, air-tightness, and acoustic ambitions of this exemplar development within strict budget and programme constraints. The overall building is designed to Code 4 CSH, NHBC and Lifetime Homes standards.