New rise of London

London

Cast an eye in either direction along the Thames River from Waterloo Bridge -- easily the best view of the city -- and it quickly becomes evident the 21st century is getting a grip on London’s jumbled skyline.

Dozens of cranes trawl the riverbank, the mark of a building spurt unseen in the centuries since Christopher Wren supervised London’s reconstruction after the Great Fire of 1666. This is a city where the skyline is defined in imagination if not always in practice by Wren’s magnificent domes, a place where Georgian architecture lies down with Victorian, ancient ruins with the odd medieval jewel.

It does not appear to be the sort of place for an architect to wade in clutching computer models and ambitions to build the tallest tower in Europe.

But up is where Renzo Piano wants to take London. The Genoa-born, Paris-based architect was invited by one of the city’s flush developers to dream a future for the southern end of fabled London Bridge. Irvine Sellar, a property tycoon who began in business selling gloves in the swinging London of the ‘60s, bought the site in 1998 with two partners, declaring his intention to knock down one of the city’s uglier architectural efforts and build an 87-story tower on the site.

That was quickly vetoed by aviation authorities -- the route down the Thames is on the flight path to Heathrow Airport. So Sellar lowered his target and turned Piano’s imagination loose. Two years later, the Italian produced a model for a 66-story, 1,016-foot glass tower that will knife the air above the Thames.

It is a bold design of glass shards, its irregular geometry sweeping breezily skyward until, as Piano says, “it disappears into the sky like the mast of a tall ship.” About 7,500 people a day are expected to use its offices, hotel and 14 apartments, but Piano promises the building’s transparency and tilted reflections of sky will give his building an airy feel. “It is very light, very elegant,” the 65-year-old architect said in an interview from his Paris office. “The breeze will blow through the top. You will see the birds on the other side.”

There are, on the other hand, those who don’t want to see it built at all.

“London is under siege from tall buildings and tall building proposals,” says Nick Antram of English Heritage, the organization leading the fight to ground Piano’s tower. Antram has nothing against Piano’s design itself. “We do feel a bit conflicted opposing something so wonderful,” he admitted during a walk around the chaotic London Bridge neighborhood to point out where the tower would intrude. “Piano’s design is exciting. It’s just the wrong scale in the wrong place.”

Right time, though. The London Bridge Tower has come along as the city is throwing off its architectural shyness about height and sprouting skyscrapers (although the heights being contemplated are actually modest by comparison to the rest of the world: Europe’s current tallest building, the 850-foot-high Commerzbank Tower in Frankfurt, doesn’t even crack the world’s top-50 list).

The boom has been triggered by good times in London, which has asserted itself in the last decade as the unchallenged financial center of Europe -- even if much of the action takes place downriver at Canary Wharf, where another cluster of towers keeps getting fatter. The height is necessary, advocates say, to offer enough office space and to accommodate all those cables carrying electronic traffic.

But there is also a mood in London political circles that a bona fide 21st century “world city” pedigree requires nothing less than a few good skyscrapers. Fifteen, in fact, says Ken Livingstone, the city’s socialist mayor who presides happily over the current explosion of construction.

Livingstone himself now settles into a mayor’s chair in a spanking new Norman Foster-designed city hall, its glass front bulging out like a beer belly over the river just east of London Bridge. Looking west, he can watch the last panes of glass being fitted to Foster’s Swiss Re building, finishing the distinctive conical design that has made it popularly known as the Gherkin (or, to some, the Erotic Gherkin). And work should begin soon on the 42-story Heron Tower, the Kohn Pederson Fox Associates building that is meant to be the heart of the central business district.

To Livingstone, skyscraper critics such as English Heritage and that fusty, interfering Prince Charles are nothing less than a conservationist “Taliban.” After all, English Heritage opposed the London Eye, the tilted Ferris wheel built for the millennium. Derided as kitsch before it was built, the Eye has become a fixture of the new London skyline. Even English Heritage came around to support extending its life by 25 years.

Yet English Heritage (and even Prince Charles) insist the issue with skyscrapers is quality and location, not height. Antram cites numerous worries, noting that London Bridge Tower would loom over the courtyard of the Tower of London, a World Heritage Site and tourist magnet just across the Thames. The skyscraper’s modernity would be a distraction from the Tower’s medieval feel, he claims.

But the heritage community’s main worry is how Piano’s glass shard will look when it rises as a backdrop to long-range views of St. Paul’s Cathedral, Wren’s most famous landmark.

St. Paul’s is the material embodiment of London’s soul. In a city of iconic buildings, it remains the symbol of London’s endurance, the subject of perhaps the most famous London photograph ever: its dome standing with Churchillian defiance amid the inferno of a German bombing raid. Such was the emotional tug of St. Paul’s that until the 1950s, there was a prohibition on any building taller than its 365-foot spire. Sightlines to the cathedral from spots as far as 7 kilometers away on Parliament Hill are protected as part of the national heritage, known in bureaucratese as “strategic views.”

Piano’s building would intrude on those vantage points and make a mockery of that policy, says English Heritage. It is why the organization dragged the architect into a month of public hearings on the project, an inquiry that concluded Friday. Permission will not be granted or denied until fall.

“His building is three times the height of St. Paul’s,” says Antram, one of two expert witnesses called by English Heritage at the hearings. “It will dwarf the silhouette of the cathedral and reduce St. Paul’s to a plaything at the foot of the tower.”

For his part, Piano -- who also designed Berlin’s Potsdamer Platz and has been commissioned for the new New York Times building -- respectfully acknowledges the concerns of his critics, then swats away at their logic.

“Nobody, nobody will ever be able to compete with that dome,” says the architect. The computer simulations showing his tower swallowing St. Paul’s are “too static,” he complains. “It is like taking one phrase from a speech and using it entirely out of context.”

The problem, he admits, is that architects who want to build skyward are paying for the sins of their fathers. The generation of architects and builders who spent the postwar years filling the craters left by the Luftwaffe bequeathed London a dispiriting pile of ugly concrete high-rise boxes. “We have done a lot of damage to our skyline over the last 50 years,” says Richard Rogers, who was Piano’s partner in the 1970s when they combined to build the then-controversial Pompidou Center in Paris.

Rogers is a passionate defender of his old partner’s plans for London Bridge. The problem isn’t high buildings, he told the inquiry. The real curse is mediocrity. Yes, Piano’s design would be a highly visible presence, Rogers said. Yes, it will draw the eye. “But ‘distracting’ is not necessarily a bad thing if one is distracted by beauty,” he argued.

Indeed Rogers sees the shard of glass as just the first of a cluster of skyscrapers at London Bridge. The bridge links the city of London to a historic neighborhood called Southwark, a place that has stubbornly guarded its reputation for scruffiness through the ages. Southwark is where Chaucer’s pilgrims set out for Canterbury from the Tabard Inn, and the area always played host to those enterprises -- markets, prisons, breweries and vinegar makers -- unwelcome in the city of London itself. Local Borough Market is the first recorded public market in London. It is 1,000 years old.

But everyone agrees the area needs fixing. Rail, subway and bus lines bring 200,000 people a day through London Bridge station, but the street life is unappealing and in some cases, as Piano puts it, “only for the brave.” For some, such as Rogers, a high-rise cluster would revive the area -- while conveniently knocking down some of the worst examples of the postwar architectural banality.

Piano is not so sure about his building having company. “It’s made to be lonely,” he says.

And he wants his building to be an inviting public place. He uses glass with low iron content to let more light through. His tower, he says, will be less imposing, less arrogant than the typical skyscraper. To which English Heritage counters that it has been promised the same before, only to be stuck with sky-choking, inaccessible blocks.

“The problem is you cannot prove quality before your building is built,” Piano says. “Architecture is a proper art but it is an imposed art. Once you do something, if it is wrong, if you make a mistake, you are imposing it on people. And there have been so many mistakes.”

But he quickly regains his enthusiasm. London has always prospered through addition, he argues.

“After all, St. Paul’s itself was a modern addition to the city in its day.”