Tall buildings in London, say various forms of official policy on the matter, should be well designed and in the right place. Well I never. Who could possibly disagree with that? Hands up all those who want badly designed skyscrapers in the wrong places.
Yet, if you survey the hundreds of plans for towers at various stages of planning and construction in London, it’s hard to find those elusive beings that have both or even either quality, projects that are unequivocally Well Designed And In The Right Place – let’s call them WDAITRPs. The Walkie Talkie? No on both counts. The St George tower in Vauxhall, and the Strata in Elephant and Castle? Ditto. The Shard? Arguably one but not the other.
Three new proposals stand out for their ambition and for the reputations of the architects and/or developers. They are high. One, called 1 Undershaft, approaches the height of the Shard, and due to being built on relatively raised ground may actually reach a point higher than what was once the tallest building in Europe. Another is only slightly lower. Each, on its own, might once have provoked a mighty storm of controversy. Now, so commonplace have big vertical buildings become, that one has already slipped through the planning process with barely a murmur. The question is whether any or all might be WDAITRPs.
One is proposed next to Paddington station on a former Royal Mail facility. It would be the least high of the three – the developers are not yet precise on the matter but say it will be about 64 storeys – but would also be the most conspicuous, by virtue of the fact that there is nothing of comparable height around it. Most of the area surrounding 31 London Street is composed of five- or six-storey Victorian terraces and smaller mewses, still tatty around the station but rapidly ascending in price and smartness as you head towards Notting Hill. There are some medium-height new office blocks in an area called Paddington Basin but nothing more.
The new tower would feature prominently in views from Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens, and ever since the 1960s, when the towers of the Knightsbridge barracks and the Hilton in Park Lane mugged the rustic illusion of the park, it has been widely agreed that such things should never happen again. For this reason proposals for Paddington towers by Nicholas Grimshaw and Richard Rogers were, in this millennium, respectively stopped and reduced. Its developer, however, argues that special circumstances mean that his tower should succeed where others failed.
The proposal is in fact Shard 2.0, with the same developer, Irvine Sellar, and architect, Renzo Piano, who created the celebrated spike that rises over London Bridge station. Like the Shard, it would rise next to a major transport interchange and promises to improve the tangled overloaded mess of subways and access roads. The cramped ticket halls of the underground would be expanded where possible and the approach to the main station, currently a ramp shared with service vehicles, would be improved. An acre of “world class” public realm would be created. On another site, in desirable St Johns Wood, the developers would pay for affordable housing for single women. To deflect criticism that this will be a silo for the ultra-rich, Sellar and his team say that the apartments will be relatively small. As for the impact on Hyde Park, they say that the tower will be curved-sided and exceptionally slender, and therefore a delicate and refined presence on the park skyline.
All this, says Sellar, is an unrepeatable offer, a now-or-never opportunity to rescue Paddington’s stations from eternal chaos. He talks of the liveliness and energy generated by the Shard. He appears to be getting a lot of encouragement and support from the mayor of London and a positive hearing from the City of Westminster. And, indeed, the form of the tower is elegant, more so than the Shard. Leaving questions of location aside, it is one of the better tower designs, architecturally speaking, of modern London.
Sellar, in short, is doing what he did with the Shard, which is to spot an opportunity and go for it with a combination of bold commissioning, persuasive salesmanship and sheer nerve. Good luck to him. With the Shard he proved a lot of doubters, who said that it would never be built, wrong. But Westminster, the mayor and the general public should ask whether this is really an offer they cannot refuse.
Related: 22 Bishopsgate – and the steroidal towers set to ruin London's skyline
The first questions are whether it will really be quite so ethereal as claimed and whether it will not be a catalyst for several more towers in the same area, probably of inferior design. In which case it should be asked what is good about having a cluster of tall buildings in this location. How vital would be the flats – which in spite of being small-ish would still go for large sums – to the wellbeing of the neighbourhood? Then, how transformative, really, would the changes be to the station and underground? It is currently impossible to tell on the available information, but if it is to be used as a justification for height, the burden of proof should be on the developer to show how beneficial it would be.
The access to the main station could certainly be improved, but it’s not obvious that an acre of “public realm” is really what’s needed, which unsurprisingly turns out to contain a lot of retail. I’d question the world-class-ness (of what, to be fair, is currently a work in progress), as Piano’s confidence in handling the slender shaft unravels at its base. The proposed new work aspires to the suave modernity that is Piano’s favoured register, but it doesn’t feel comfortable with the awkward and characterful buildings at its base.
And, if the station works really were as vital as described, is it the best or only way to pay for it by mining value from the airspace of London? What if Westminster took the trouble to study the opportunities for fundraising offered by the wider area around the station, rather than grabbing the first opportunity that came along? What if – perish the thought – government thought it worth paying for such infrastructure directly, rather than trying to finagle it out of the planning system? What indeed if this land, not long ago a public asset in the possession of the nationalised Royal Mail, had not been sold and resold to private buyers, each looking to extract a chunky slice of value, and instead had been developed in the public interest?
In all cases the story of the Shard should give rise to caution. It set a precedent for a series of other towers across London in which claims for good design became ever less credible. While it contributed to improvements to the station at its base, London Bridge remains seriously flawed. And eloquent statements made by its architect didn’t match reality. It would have a “nice light presence”, he said, and that in the contentious view from Hampstead Heath, where the Shard appears right next to the dome of St Paul’s, “the two buildings will kiss each other”. They don’t, unless the kiss is of the Glasgow kind. In Paddington, Piano says that his curved-sided tower achieves vertically the shape, scale and proportion of one of Brunel’s horizontal station vaults. This is a cute conceit, but one of no relevance to the urban impact of the project.
So we could file Piano’s 31 London Street under (mostly) Good Design But In The Wrong Place. Meanwhile, in the City of London, permission has already been granted to 22 Bishopsgate. This is a block which, with 1.4m square feet of floor space, would be the largest office building ever built in London. At 278 metres it would be taller than anything currently standing by some margin: 25% higher than its neighbour the Cheesegrater. It replaces the Pinnacle, otherwise known as the Helter-Skelter, a contorted, would-be iconic design on which construction was abandoned after work started on its foundations and concrete core.
It stands in an area which the City’s planners have long designated as “cluster of towers”, as it is both the centre of its financial energy and stands apart from views of St Paul’s. So it is in the right place. Its developer, Stuart Lipton, stresses what he calls the “wellness” it will generate, whereby hard-working modern employees might replenish their spirits with music, art or fitness classes, daylight and fresh air, and outlets selling low-fat foods. “We are trying on all fronts to be more human,” says Lipton. There will be a pioneering system to deliver supplies, whereby specially trained drivers will do their work efficiently and outside peak traffic hours. There will be ample provision for cyclists. Lipton also envisages that his tower will be filled with hundreds of new tech companies rather than the large financial institutions and consultancies more usual in the City.
The tower is designed by Karen Cook of PLP, who was on the team that designed the Pinnacle. Here she has done a good job of sculpting and faceting the building’s shape, such that from some angles it might be thought to soar. Its aesthetic doesn’t yet convince as the hot-cool alternative kind of workspace that Lipton describes – it feels more like a conventional corporate project trying hard to unbutton, like a suited man in a Christmas paper hat – but there is no reason to doubt that it will fulfil Lipton’s admirable wellness objectives. But for all that the building remains fearsomely, enormously big, in a way that the most brilliant architecture could not disguise. It is a beast, a brute, a lump that will loom and oppress. Which means you can’t call it good design.
This leaves 1 Undershaft, which would at 294.6m above ground level still be taller than 22 Bishopsgate. It is also in the cluster, so it is in the right place. It would replace the Aviva, formerly Commercial Union tower, a glass-and-black-steel in the style of Mies van der Roche from the 60s, which would now be a listed building if it had not been wrecked by an IRA bomb in 1992 and then indifferently restored. More importantly, the replacement will be finer than the original.
In a departure from the frantic shapes of the last decade, this building is rectangular or nearly so, tapering almost imperceptibly as it rises. Its cladding is not generic glass and steel, but includes strips of white vitreous enamel overlaid with big bronze coloured X-shaped struts that stiffen the structure. These would give depth, substance and subtlety to the surfaces. Like other towers it promises the benefits of a viewing gallery and open space at ground level, but it goes beyond the exploitative restaurant terraces and retail zones that such places tend to become. At the bottom most of the building lifts off the ground, to create a generous wall-less hall that allows views between the churches of St Helen’s Bishopsgate and St Andrew Undershaft. Its architect, Eric Parry, has developed his skills with university buildings and museums rather than commercial projects. He doesn’t deal with ciphers and diagrams but with the experiences, physical and perceptual, that buildings generate.
At last, then, a WDAITRP. 1 Undershaft is still big, if at 900,000 sq ft smaller than 22 Bishopsgate. A decade or two ago, it might have been inconceivable. But the scale of London is changing, as it has before, which is not in itself a bad thing. The question is how the shift is handled – whether it must always mean towers and, when it does, how they are designed. If every projected tall building showed Parry’s intelligence, the city would be in a much better state now.
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