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London’s Shard

July 5, 2013 by · Comments Off on London’s Shard 

London’s Shard, The Shard, also referred to as the Shard of Glass, The Shard replaced Southwark Towers, a 24-storey office block built on the site in Southwark in 1975. Renzo Piano, the Shard’s architect, worked with the architectural firm Broadway Malyan during the planning stage. The glass-clad pyramidal tower has 72 habitable floors, with a viewing gallery and open-air observation deck – the UK’s highest – on the 72nd floor, at a height of 244.3 metres (802 ft).

The Shard was designed in 2000 by Renzo Piano, an Italian architect previously best known for creating Paris’s Pompidou Centre in collaboration with Britain’s Richard Rogers. That year, the London-based entrepreneur Irvine Sellar decided to redevelop Southwark Towers, a 1970s office block next to London Bridge station, and flew to Berlin in March 2000 to meet Piano for lunch. According to Sellar, the architect spoke of his contempt for tall buildings during the meal, before flipping over the restaurant’s menu and sketching an iceberg-like sculpture emerging from the River Thames. He was inspired by the railway lines next to the site, the London spires depicted by the 18th-century Venetian painter Canaletto, and the masts of sailing ships.

In July 2002, the then-Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott, ordered a planning inquiry after the Shard development plans were opposed by local authorities and heritage bodies, including the Royal Parks Foundation and English Heritage. The inquiry took place in April and May 2003, and on 19 November 2003, the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister announced that construction had been approved. The government released a letter stating that:

Mr Prescott would only approve skyscrapers of exceptional design. For a building of this size to be acceptable, the quality of its design is critical. He is satisfied that the proposed tower is of the highest architectural quality.

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