Winner due this summer

Marshgate i

Five firms including Laing O’Rourke and Sir Robert McAlpine will find out this summer who has won a £200m deal to build the largest building in the first phase of a new campus for UCL at the former Olympic Park in east London.

The pair are joined on the shortlist by Lendlease, Mace and Bouygues with all five picking up tender documents this week.

Called Marshgate I (pictured), the building has been designed by Stanton Williams, a former Stirling Prize winner, and will be a new 35,000 sq m research, innovation and teaching building. Construction is expected to start by next summer.

Marshgate I is part of the university’s wider UCL East campus project which is being built to ease the pressure on space at its central London site in Bloomsbury.

UCL East will run across 180,000 sq m and will add an extra 40% of space to its estate.

It will also include Pool Street, a 16,500 sq m mixed-use facility comprising university residential and academic space, designed by Lifschutz Davidson Sandilands. The masterplan for the campus has been drawn up by LDA Design.

UCL East, which is being built close to Zaha Hadid’s aquatics centre, is part of the wider Olympicopolis cultural and arts project on the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park first proposed by former London mayor Boris Johnson.

The neighbouring Stratford Waterfront project for Sadler’s Wells theatre, the London College of Fashion and the V&A museum is being designed by Allies & Morrison, O’Donnell & Tuomey and Arquitecturia.