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High art - or height of folly?
(Filed: 14/04/2003) - telegraph.co.uk

Tomorrow, a public inquiry opens into the proposed 1,000ft London Bridge Tower. Giles Worsley believes that, if approved, it will open the floodgates for a new generation of super-skyscrapers

Slowly, relentlessly, architects and developers are pushing the boundaries, finding chinks through which they can drive immensely tall buildings up above the London skyline. Norman Foster's Gherkin is nearly complete. Attempts last year to stop the Bishopsgate Tower failed. And tomorrow the public inquiry opens on the most dramatic skyscraper so far, Renzo Piano's London Bridge Tower, which, if built, will soar 1,016ft, making it Europe's tallest building.

The scheme is the brainchild of Irvine Sellar, who made his fortune in Carnaby Street in the 1960s but is now recast as a major architectural patron. When his first proposal, a banal tower by the architects Broadway Malyan, was universally derided, he took the shrewd move of calling in Piano.

Piano is the sort of sophisticated European architect who makes one question British claims to a wealth of homegrown architectural talent. The architect, with Richard Rogers, of the Pompidou Centre in Paris, Piano has gone on to build an immensely successful practice, from the monumental scale of Kansai International Airport in Japan to the jewel-like Beyeler Foundation in Basel. If anyone can pull off a building on this scale, it should be Piano, who has never built in this country.

He has certainly come up with a breathtaking design. Shaped like a cathedral spire, it tapers as it rises, nine different planes of glass giving a multi-faceted appearance as they rise to a peak and then feather, instead of meeting at a single point. Much has been made of the fact that the building will have particularly transparent glass, but that is beside the point. Like all glass towers, London Bridge Tower can never be transparent, but Piano's manipulation of the elevation and its tapering form will give his building a variety and subtlety that few other skyscrapers have ever achieved. If you have to have a building on this scale, Piano's design is probably as good as you can get.

But nothing can avoid the fact that this massive building will transform the scale of London. St Paul's Cathedral still holds its own against tall buildings in the City, but London Bridge Tower is three times its height.

At the moment, Tower 42, the former NatWest Tower, sets an unofficial 600ft height limit in central London. If London Bridge Tower gets the go-ahead, all developers will be aiming at 1,000ft, the limit imposed by the Civil Aviation Authority. London will become a high-rise city, with the dome of St Paul's slowly reduced to a pimple.

Organised opposition to such a transformation has largely evaporated. The Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment, which generally supports London Bridge Tower, is never going to object to tall buildings on principle, however high they go, whatever their impact on the city. But that is only to be expected from CABE, dominated as it is by developers and architects who never know when they, too, might want to build on this scale.

Those who trust English Heritage to defend London's skyline are also mistaken. Ever since Sir Jocelyn Stevens sold the pass on Norman Foster's Gherkin, English Heritage has had to accept the principle of immensely tall buildings. It is opposing London Bridge Tower because of the impact on the protected sightlines of St Paul's Cathedral from Kenwood and Parliament Hill. It also has concerns about the impact on local listed buildings and conservation areas and on the world heritage sites of the Tower of London and the Palace of Westminster. But as Nick Antram, English Heritage's deputy regional director for London, puts it: "We don't have an in principle objection to buildings of any height."

Terrorism remains a major threat to building on this scale. As does the impact on the surrounding area, particularly downdraft - a building of this size creates strong winds at ground level, in this case requiring much of St Thomas's Street to be permanently covered.

Given that Southwark Borough Council has approved the scheme, the most likely obstacle to the tower's being built is economics. Arguments that London needs tall buildings to compete internationally have proved hollow. Canary Wharf, with its thicket of towers, is scrabbling to find tenants. The claim that the Gherkin had to be so tall because large international companies needed headquarters this big fell apart when it emerged that the occupiers, Swiss Re, will only take about half the building. London has a glut of office space.

Skyscrapers are inefficient buildings because they need so much space for lifts and other services. To work financially, their floorplate has to be as large as possible, like Canary Wharf's monolithic One Canada Square. Piano's tapering design means that only the bottom 29 stories are offices; the rest is a hotel, observation galleries, apartments and a giant radiator at the top to help cool the building. To make the figures add up, a squat 16-storey backpack of offices has had to be bolted on but, even so, it is hard to see how the tower makes financial sense, or that there is any compelling need for it in London.

Some cynics believe the tower will never be built, but that if the planning inquiry finds in the tower's favour, this alone will dramatically raise the value of the site, making it a good asset against which to borrow to finance other schemes. Moreover, whether or not it is built, this permission would set a clear precedent for the future of London's skyline.

London Bridge Tower is a Trojan Horse, a skilful design by a great architect that could open the floodgates to a new generation of very tall skyscrapers, few of which are likely to be as elegant as Piano's scheme, if only because financial sense argues against it.

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“We shape our Cities, thereafter they shape us.”