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preceding London’s award of the games, set out the environmental and sustainability requirements. All homes had to be Code for Sustainable Homes Level 4, and meet Lifetime Homes standards and Housing Quality Index criteria. Fletcher Priest was to oversee the designs of all 15 architects on the site to ensure coherence. ‘The Design Board didn’t want a zoo of buildings on the site. We had to ensure that a formal grammar was embedded in the design guidelines developed with Patel Taylor and we had to audit that,’ says Kendall. ‘There was a lot for the architects to think about – environmental and construction parameters, the complexities of tenures, sizes and uses. The scheme’s robustness was in being able to cope with this, as well as an accelerated programme. But we needed to rationalise the structural blocks as well as approaches to facade design,’ he adds. Setting working parameters was key to

RIBA JOURNAL : SEPTEMBER 2011

‘ Fletcher Priest was to oversee the designs of all 15 architects on the site to ensure coherence’

ensuring completion by 2012, so contractor Lend Lease and architect Glenn Howells created a basic ‘chassis design’. Each block runs around the perimeter of the site with a car park at ground level. Either three-storey townhouses or retail units mask this parking zone, and on its roof at first floor level is a courtyard comprising perimeter private gardens for the townhouses and a central common space for residents. Every block runs 8-14 storeys high, driven by requirements from LOCOG (London Organising Committee for the Olympic and Paralympic Games) that no athlete be accommodated above the eighth floor (support staff will go on higher floors). Staying within the 30m height rule under Section 20 of the London Building Act also obviated the obligation for most sprinklers. For each typical 100m by 80m block engineers

went for a mix of precast and post-tensioned slabs as part of a reinforced concrete frame,