his is Portlands Place by the amazing Hawkins Brown Architects, photographed in March of this year, which was featured in the Architects Journal.

Located on Plot 6 within the former 2012 Olympic Athletes Village, in Stratford, East London, the scheme consists of two towers of 26 and 31 storeys, linked by a double-height “Skybridge”, and both connect to two lower blocks of 10 storeys.

Portlands Place is a shared living space, meaning that it contains lounges, cinema rooms and other communal areas intended for informal working and meetings, as well as 524 new homes.

The buildings were constructed by Mace using HRS (High Rise Solutions) which enabled an extremely rapid pace of construction – one floor per week – and reduced the vehicular movement around the site by 40%.

The facade was designed by the architects to be as colourful as possible, with a different but related colour palette in evidence in each tower. Precast concrete has a beautiful softness to it, and coloured glass balustrades create vivid graphic effects.

The defined colour palettes also register internally, another illustration of the practice’s innovative approach to colour.

On a beautiful, slightly misty morning, the buildings looked stunning, almost a little Manhattan-esque.