A landmark civic building in the Olympic Park originally built for the games, it is now a significant legacy building which provides state-of-the-art NHS primary care and community facilities.

The Sir Ludwig Guttmann Health and Wellbeing Centre, in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, was designed to serve both as the Athletes’ Polyclinic for the London 2012 Olympics and afterwards, as a pioneering integrated Primary Health Care Centre for its wider locality. It provides 3,800m2 state-of-the-art NHS primary care facilities with an additional 1,500m2 of facilities for community use.

The building was designed as a true test of flexibility and adaptability in healthcare; to meet the LOCOG brief for Olympics’ use in 2012, then six weeks later to serve the needs of the Paralympics, and finally, but most importantly, to meet the needs of an innovative GP-led Primary Care Centre, to serve the local population for years to come.

The design responds to its nine and ten storey residential neighbours with a strong sculptural form and simple materials, achieving a landmark quality befitting of its post-Olympic place in the community.

The main façade is set back creating a generous, welcoming arcade of shop fronts rendered in gold, silver and bronze to reflect the Olympic medals, and includes a café, pharmacy and drop-in youth centre, each with its own identity. The highly glazed entrance welcomes visitors into the bright, airy interior. Externally, white ceramic clinker brick with a complementary mortar colour and precast concrete accessories achieves the intended monolithic surface, giving a sense of solidity and permanence.

The building’s heating and hot water is provided via a large-scale district heating system. This provides short term carbon reductions and enables a more straightforward move to fully de-carbonised heat in the future. An in-situ concrete frame with high recycled content provides thermal mass, resistance to vibrations from passing trains, and built-in flexibility for long term change.

Despite its small size, this civic building delivers maximum impact through its sculptural form and materiality.

Mark Rowe, Principal at Penoyre & Prasad said:

“As relative late comers to the Athletes Village we had the advantage of being able to see, and respond to, the more developed designs of the other buildings around us rather than the sketchy canvas of a masterplan. From the outset we were very aware of how small our building was in relation to its neighbours, and we knew that an appropriate civic presence would only be achieved through strong architectural expression.

The unique promontory nature of our plot, bounded on either side by massive railway cuttings, is suggestive of a plinth – whatever you build there is seen in splendid isolation as an object from all sides. I think it was this that provoked our first sculptural responses, Ricky Burdett jokingly referred to one of our initial sketch models as ‘Alvaro Siza’s first building in London’ during a Design Review Panel presentation! We took this as a complement.

Sitting on the main road linking the Stadium to Leyton after the Games, our building now serves both the Village and existing communities, so we were conscious that the dynamic form of our building should acknowledge that pull in both directions. As a result, the building appears as an object in torsion, exciting architecturally and also a subtle allusion to the athleticism of the Games themselves.”