Next City of the Sky? / Nella Fantasia

 

London: Next City of the Sky?

 

Hayes Davidson   A computer-generated image of what the London skyline would look like in 2010 if planned high-rises come to fruition.

By ALAN RIDING

Published: June 30, 2004

 

 

ONDON — "Earth has not anything to show more fair," Wordsworth wrote of London two centuries ago. But the "ships, towers, domes, theaters and temples" that he admired from Westminster Bridge have long since given way to a more tawdry view, shaped as much by postwar bad taste as by wartime bombing. Now, with a panache rarely seen here, London has concluded that it is time to repair its battered skyline.

 

In doing so, it is looking quite literally for a new profile, one with shapely skyscrapers designed by big-name architects proclaiming London's determination to be known as an innovative 21st-century metropolis. By 2010, not just the majestic dome of St. Paul's Cathedral but also a new forest of glass and steel will symbolize the ancient heart of London. After centuries of sprawling growth, the city is finally reaching for the sky.

 

A number of Londoners are worried. They already fear that the city is losing its historic identity. For them, the ideal solution would be to tear down the concrete office towers thrown up in the 1960's and 70's. Instead, the strategy is to surround the eyesores with stylish new high-rises in the hope of hiding bad architecture behind good architecture. But even this approach is perilous: skyscrapers that look daring today have a way of looking dated tomorrow.

 

Richard Rogers Partnership

 

A computer-generated image

of the proposed British Land

Company building designed

by Richard Rogers.

 

 

Ken Livingstone, who in 2000 became the first elected mayor of London, seems bent on taming the traditional free-to-do-as-they-will developers with some old-fashioned urban planning, but he also believes that central London needs greater population density. And to achieve this, he has endorsed the principle of building upward.

 

Architects could not be happier. Until recently, while they were designing skyscrapers from New York to Shanghai, their work in London was largely revamping existing buildings like the Royal Opera House and the British Museum. (The Laban dance center in southeast London, designed by Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, is a rare new cultural structure.) This spring, with the completion of a striking 40-floor high-rise in the heart of the city's financial center, Norman Foster has come to personify the new policy.

 

He is hardly alone. For the first time since Christopher Wren rebuilt old London after the Great Fire of 1666, British and foreign architects alike have the power to transform the city's look. Mr. Livingstone's chief adviser on architecture and urbanism is a renowned architect, Richard Rogers. And while developers are driving the rush to build, it is the prestige of the architects that is making this possible.

 

The City of London, the so-called Square Mile east of St. Paul's Cathedral that serves as Europe's financial capital, is the focal point of new growth. "New City Architecture," an exhibition that is displaying models of 21 of the "finest" completed and planned projects in the City, picked five by Mr. Foster and three by Mr. Rogers.

 

Not all are tall. Mr. Rogers's Lloyd's Register of Shipping headquarters, with its glass and piping exterior echoing the Georges Pompidou Center in Paris, which he designed in the 1970's with Renzo Piano, does not break the skyline. Mr. Foster's Millennium Bridge, which he designed with the sculptor Anthony Caro, is elegant but also usefully links St. Paul's Cathedral to the Tate Modern, a former power plant converted by Herzog & de Meuron.

 

However, it is Mr. Foster's new 600-foot-high building at 30 St. Mary Axe, which resembles a squat missile and has been nicknamed the Gherkin, that has fueled the push upward. Among other high-rises planned or near completion are Mr. Rogers's tall, slim triangular building for the British Land Company, Nicholas Grimshaw's 43-floor Minerva Building and Kohn Pedersen Fox's Heron Tower.

 

Robert Finch, the lord mayor of the City of London, definitely approves. "As a property lawyer who has been working in the City for over 30 years," he said in welcoming the "New City Architecture" exhibition, "I am delighted to see the dynamic ways in which the City has been able to make the most of the land available to promote iconic buildings which have become landmarks not only in London but across the world."

 

But St. Paul's Cathedral, which survived the blitz, cannot be overlooked. Until 1950, no building was permitted to rise above its 300-foot-high dome. But then rectangular towers began appearing, and even the front view of the cathedral was interrupted by an ugly office building. In 1987, Prince Charles lamented, "In the space of a mere 15 years, the planners, architects and developers of the City wrecked London's skyline and desecrated the dome of St. Paul's."

 

Today, planners' permission for new high-rises is linked to preserving sightlines of St. Paul's from different places in London. Sightlines to the Houses of Parliament in Westminster and the Tower of London are also considered important, and their obstruction is the main reason conservation groups like English Heritage and Historic Royal Palaces have tried to block some proposed high-rises. None, however, have been vetoed so far.

 

Neil Cossons, chairman of English Heritage, said his objection to the 600-foot-high Heron Tower was that "it would fundamentally damage a world-famous view."

 

John Barnes, conservation director of Historic Royal Palaces, said he feared the new Minerva Building would loom over the Tower of London. And he said he intended to oppose construction of what could become Europe's tallest building, the London Bridge Tower, or Shard of Glass, designed by Mr. Piano.

 

This 66-floor, 1,016-foot-high building, planned for the south bank of the Thames River, resembles a Gothic spire, broad at its base, then rising to a point. Mr. Piano believes that the Shard of Glass's shape fits into the London skyline and has emphasized its mixed commercial, residential and cultural use, as well as its energy-saving innovations. A public inquiry will nonetheless be held before approval is granted.

 

Still, architects here are on a roll. one, Ken Shuttleworth, recently proposed a round, 984-foot-high tower nicknamed the Vortex. Wide at the top and bottom and narrow at the waist, it resembles an elongated egg timer.

 

Whether it will ever built — Mr. Shuttleworth says he is working with a developer — the Vortex shows that architects here are thinking vertically.

While architecture can be a tool for urban regeneration, in one case this year it backfired. The opening of the Tate Modern on Bankside in 2000 immediately raised the quality of life in the run-down borough of Southwark. But when a 20-floor apartment building was planned for a site 150 feet from the museum entrance, the Tate objected. The case went to court, but the developers won.

 

"It's a sad day for Bankside," Nicholas Serota, the Tate's director, said.

So the drive upward continues unabated. Indeed, just as the high-rises built in the 1980's in Canary Wharf on the eastern periphery of London present a strong profile, it is possible that a concentration of tall buildings in the Square Mile will also provide a visual coherence. But it also seems likely to many that skyscrapers rising in isolation out of this horizontal city will always look out of place.

 

In the end, though, what most worries traditionalists is that London is losing its character.

 

"The capital's historic distinctiveness lies at the heart of its success," Mr. Cossons of English Heritage said. "We want developers to reinforce that distinctiveness, not obliterate it. So we will continue to champion the historic buildings, areas and views that make London unique."

He faces a tough battle.

 

   

 

 

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