It’s one of London’s largest cultural urban-design projects since the rebuilding of the South Bank, by the Thames, after the second World War.

Incorporating dance and music studios, a museum, a university campus, housing and social spaces, East Bank, at Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, is an entirely new urban quarter in one of the world’s most cosmopolitan cities. Behind the design is the Irish practice O’Donnell+Tuomey.

It started with a newspaper article just over a decade ago. “We were on the Tube to Heathrow,” Sheila O’Donnell says, who with John Tuomey was completing the practice’s Saw Swee Hock Student Centre for the London School of Economics, a building that would go on to be named London building of the year by the Royal Institute of British Architects, or Riba, and win many other awards.

“I was reading the Evening Standard, looking for puzzles to keep us going on the plane. And there was an article about getting ‘set for the Olympicopolis’.”

The plan was to bring a branch of Sadler’s Wells dance theatre, an outpost of the Victoria & Albert Museum, music studios for the BBC, a building for the London College of Fashion and a campus for University College London, together with housing, to part of the former site of the 2012 Olympics, between Hackney and Stratford, about 10km northeast of Trafalgar Square.

“I thought, ‘That’s got to be our next project. It’s universities, it’s theatrical performance, it’s a museum. Those are all our things’. And John said, ‘You know everyone in the world will be going for that?’”

Tuomey was right, but O’Donnell’s instinct was on the money too.