The 'random eruption' of London's Shard

The Shard is designed to be an iconic landmark on London’s skyline but the Qatari-funded building is finding it hard to make friends

EDWARD JONES, the distinguished architect who once taught at UCD as well as the universities of Cornell, Harvard, Princeton and Toronto, thinks Renzo Piano should be banned from building in Britain because of his effrontery in designing the Shard, which last month formally became Europe’s tallest skyscraper.

“It’s a ridiculous notion to put a 1,000ft building in a side street. It makes all the buildings around it suddenly look useless and pathetic. It does no service to the city,” he says of the glazed pyramid on steroids that rises from the south bank of the Thames. “We should put him in the Tower of London to contemplate his folly across the river.”

The setting is certainly incongruous, close to bustling Borough Market, which won the Academy of Urbanism’s Great Place award in 2007; the squat tower of Southwark Cathedral, which makes it look more like a parish church than the seat of a bishop, and the neo-classical Hall of the Worshipful Company of Glaziers and Painters of Glass.

Renzo Piano, still best-known for collaborating with Richard Rogers on the Centre Pompidou in Paris, drew his inspiration for the Shard from Canaletto’s paintings of the Thames and the masts of tall ships that once anchored in the vicinity of London Bridge. Because of its angular shape, he said it would “reflect the sky”, changing with the seasons.

Prince Andrew presided at its light-and-laser-show inauguration, accompanied by Sheikh Hamad bin Jassem bin Jabor Al Thani, prime minister of Qatar, which put up most of the money it cost to build – £450 million (€573 million). The Shard is one element of Qatar’s “roadmap” to diversify its income from oil revenues.

The Qataris are also funding a £3 billion redevelopment of Chelsea Barracks that incurred the wrath of Prince Charles for a modernist scheme by Richard Rogers, which has since been replaced by a more traditionalist masterplan by Dixon Jones (headed jointly by Edward Jones), along with Squire Partners and Kim Wilkie Associates.

Speaking at the “unveiling” of the Shard, Sheikh Abdullah bin Saoud Al Thani, governor of Qatar Central Bank and chairman of the board of Shard Funding Ltd, described the new landmark as “a beacon of the city of London’s resilience and expansion, even during tough economic times” and a tangible symbol of Qatar’s commitment to its future.

The skyscraper, which rises to a height of 309.6 metres, is to contain a mix of uses on 72 storeys with a floor area of 110,000 sq m served by 44 lifts and topped by a “spire” of glass spikes. A viewing platform on the 69th floor is to open to the public next February, with adult admission tickets steeply priced at £24.95 (€31.80).

Ten luxury apartments, with a total area of 5,770 sq m, occupy the 53rd to 65th floors; each of them reportedly carries a price-tag of £50 million (€63.8 million). There’ll also be a spa on the 52nd, a 200-room Shangri-La Hotel on levels 34 to 51, restaurants on levels 31 to 33, over 26 floors of high-spec offices.

If it wasn’t for the Qatari money, by 2009, the Shard would have become just another of many monuments to the boom that were shelved after the credit crunch and the onset of recession. In a way, it’s an example of the “Skyscraper Index”, which links the completion of skyscrapers such as the Empire State Building with economic busts.

Property developer Irvine Sellar, who oversaw the whole project, even invoked the New York landmark on the opening day when he talked about how it would become “as essential a part of a visit to London as going to the top of the Empire State building is for visitors on a trip to New York” – a major revenue-generating tourist attraction.

Renzo Piano has defended the Shard, which derives from his own description of it as “a shard of glass through the heart of historic London”. Claiming that it’s “not arrogant,” he said: “When you’re making a building like this, that’s so important for the city, you have to be absolutely sure that it’s the right thing to do . . .”.

Piano was in boom-time Berlin working on Potsdamer Platz (all that terracotta cladding) in 2000 when Sellar sought him out to design a skyscraper for the site of Southwark Towers, a 24-storey 1970s office block occupied by PricewaterhouseCoopers; the Italian “starchitect” then sketched an iceberg on the back of a restaurant lunch menu.

When the plans were revealed in 2002, they sparked polite outrage. English Heritage warned that the skyscraper would intrude on established views of St Paul’s Cathedral, while Unesco said it would compromise the “visual integrity” of the Tower of London, a World Heritage Site. The Royal Parks Foundation was also opposed.

John Prescott, then secretary of state for the environment, ordered a planning inquiry at which all the views were aired, and finally approved Piano’s plans in November 2003. A statement said he “would only approve skyscrapers of exceptional design” and he was “satisfied that the proposed tower is of the highest architectural quality”.

There are divided views on this, with those who are appalled by the Shard having the upper hand. Although Prince Andrew said it would be a “huge new boost” for the area, the Daily Telegraph‘s Harry Mount saw it as a “disaster” for London’s skyline – which hitherto had been dominated by the two high-rise clusters of the City and Canary Wharf.

He railed against its “blank, unadorned, ultra-simplistic, art-free planes of steel and glass expanded to a massive scale” and complained that the Shard “dwarfs and overshadows buildings of infinitely greater beauty, constructed with much greater artistic skill, that scale becomes a bullying, destructive thing.” Many Londoners would probably agree.

Mayor Boris Johnson called it “a quite astonishing piece of architecture.”

Echoing the public mood, he also said he thought it was “important that we do not pepper-pot the city with skyscrapers everywhere. There’s got to be control.” It is to be joined by a slab-like 19-storey glass block, which is being marketed as the Place.

The Shard, clad in 11,000 panes of glass, has now surpassed Capital City Moscow and Commerzbank in Frankfurt as the tallest building in Europe. It won’t hold this title for long, however; later this year, the Mercury City Tower in Moscow, at an expected 332 metres, will exceed it, as will the 323-metre Hermitage Plaza, at La Défense in Paris.

Its only equivalent in Dublin is the trapezoidal tower designed by Gilroy McMahon Architects to replace Liberty Hall. At 93.65 metres, this would be less than a third of the height of the Shard. But in terms of visual impact on the skyline, which in Dublin’s case is still relatively low-rise, they both qualify as random eruptions.