A Tale of Two Towers
‘The Shard is not about money or power. It is about surprise and joy.’ Renzo Piano, 2011
‘This is London, this is the Shard, and we can kick sand in the face of the Eiffel Tower.’ Irvine Sellar, 2011
Guy de Maupassant, the nineteenth century French novelist and fierce critic of the Eiffel Tower, wrote his own epitaph: ‘I have coveted everything and taken pleasure from nothing’. It makes the story that is told about him more believable: that he often lunched in the restaurant at the tower he despised because it was the only place in Paris where he didn’t have to see it. It’s a strategy which may have been useful to the Head of The Royal Palaces who toured the UNESCO team tasked with assessing the impact of the Shard on the other, older Tower over the river. By being visible from its baileys the Tower of London’s World Heritage Site status has been called into question. The Shard and its siting has divided establishment opinion.
In 2008 the newly elected Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, promised to strengthen regulations protecting historic assets. As always, his mind on other assets, he was an enthusiastic supporter of the Shard. Central governments of all complexions were consistent too, arguing that it would be a beacon signalling that London was open for business in a europe battered by recession. It was a philosophy not shared by its own heritage agency. When the proposals first arrived in the public realm, English Heritage’s press release claimed that Piano’s tower would ‘tear through historic London like a shard of glass’. The apocryphal story is that the developer’s marketing team were quick to spot the potential and the Shard gained its moniker. There is a more credible but less entertaining tale: that Piano came up with the name and it was reused opportunistically by English Heritage.
In 1887 the committee overseeing the project to build a tower in Paris had its own political and PR issues. As well as being the centrepiece of an Exposition to mark the centenary of the glorious revolution, there was also a desire to wipe the eye of industrial europe. The committee dithered for weeks over their choice of site in case it spoiled the look of the Champ de Mars. They were well aware of the weight of artistic and literary criticism lined up behind Guy de Maupassant. But, in the end it was economics which dictated the final landing place of Eiffel’s tower: its gigantic arches could create a monumental entrance to the exposition without additional cost. Not that it was a cheap project: Eiffel costed his Tower at around £1 million at the time. His contract with the City of Paris gave him a subsidy of £200,000 paid in instalments, and he was required to find another £800,000 himself through a bond sale. At today’s prices, that would bring the project in at around £67m, against £430m for the Shard. Discrepancy in the relative budgets can be explained by the inhabited typology of the Shard compared to Eiffel’s viewing tower rationale.
The self-funding deal gave Eiffel plenty of financial incentive. He brought the project in at around 6% under budget, and paid his bondholders back from ticket sales in the first year of operation. Eiffel’s Tower really did belong to Eiffel, his to operate and franchise in any way he wished for the next twenty years. Nowadays, ownership and management by the Societe de la Tour Eiffel means that lots of Parisians can and do own a piece of the tower: a stake in the ongoing history of their city. This was unlikely to be an idea that occurred to Irvine Sellar, the Carnaby Street trader turned Shard developer, when he ran into his own funding difficulties a century later.
In early 2000, the story goes that Sellar flew to Berlin to persuade a reluctant Renzo Piano to design a tower for him. It was obviously a good lunch, as according to Sellar Piano expressed his contempt for skyscrapers but then flipped the menu and sketched the iceberg form of the Shard. Whether true or not, the property boom was in full swing, and there was ready cash to back any number of tall stories. But, even before the site was cleared, the collapse of the toxic mortgage edifice across the Atlantic precipitated the banking crisis in Europe. It looked as though the Shard might never get off the ground until it was saved by Quatar, a cash rich Gulf state looking to invest their gas revenues and raise their London profile. A couple of years into the future it was to the Quatari royal family that Prince Charles sent a leaked letter, instantly killing off the Richard Rogers scheme for the Chelsea Barracks site. If he had sent one hoping to stop the Shard, then it was lost in the post. In 2008 the Quatari state banks came to Sellar’s rescue, buying 80% of the London Bridge Quarter (LBQ) project for £1.6bn. It’s a partnership which hasn’t been without its own controversies. It has even been suggested that for Qatar, the tower is more of an insurance policy for security needs than an investment opportunity; a static missile aimed at potential enemies.
LOOKING UP: FORMS AND STRATEGIES
Believing all of the PR released by the Sellar Group before construction started, you could be forgiven for thinking that the Shard would be virtually invisible; taxi drivers would look bemused if asked to go there, architecture students would spend entire semesters trying to find it. And it’s true that its complex form is in large part the result of a design strategy based around minimising its own effect. Like a self-consciously tall teenager who develops a stoop, the Shard is trying not to be noticed. Close to, its spiked form minimises the effect of mass and height by exaggerating foreshortening; literally deceiving the eye into perceiving a shorter building. So far, so normal for a prism shaped glass building. Where Piano has gone much further is to fragment each elevation into unequal shards of glass which never meet. The fractures between the inclined planes are partially overlapped by the cladding, to provide high-altitude lee to opening vents. The building contorts itself to hide itself. In Piano’s words ‘the upward slant reflects sky and clouds more effectively than vertical faces would. Reflecting the humour of the weather and the ever changing processes of the sky.’ This isn’t just ordinary glass either, but a low-iron white glass similar to crystal to achieve luminosity and high reflectivity; basically an aid to help the building disappear more effectively.
Much has been made of Piano’s supposed inspiration taken from the Thames below: paintings by Monet and Caneletto have been cited by marketing teams along with the masts of long-gone sailing ships. Whether that is credible or not, there is a vessel on the river today which has a resonance with the Shard. Angled slabs of glass break the Shard’s silhouette in an effect not unlike the dazzle camouflage used on twentieth century warships and seen nearby on HMS Belfast, moored in the Pool of London. Dazzle wasn’t intended to conceal like normal camouflage, but to confuse the eye by making it difficult to gauge distance and therefore size by breaking its outline.
LOOK AT ME: EXPERIENCE AND SIGNIFICANCE
The Shard’s first visitors won’t be able to come anywhere near the transforming experience had by the first visitors to the Eiffel Tower. It wasn’t only the adventure of being more than half a dozen stories off the ground, as cheap as an Easy Jet flight now but unfamiliar then to all except a few balloonists. Added to this was the paradox of being at once in and on a structure; inside yet outside.
There is certainly something more satisfying, more spatially engaging and enriching if you are able to see the building you are in. In a tall building this is something to do with scale: contrasting the near with the far. The twentieth century glass curtain wall is the nearest architecture has come to the four dimensional experience of the Eiffel Tower. Being high above the city streets in a modern tower also gives us the opportunity to view the city as a whole. It allows us to see it as an architect or planner does, making connections, joining up the city dot-to-dot, marrying those parts we know with those we don’t. Buildings that soared above us on the ground are rendered small, cars and trains are tiny enough to put in a pocket. Trees become soft canopies one can stroke with a hand. It’s as if the world has become an architectural model.
Eiffel’s structure is still the tallest tower that is a tower qua tower: as Barthes told us ‘a ladder to the sky with no other fundamental purpose than allowing man to climb up and look around’. Accused of building a purposeless tower, Eiffel felt duty-bound to come up with a list of possible uses even before the Tower was finished. Thankfully, the Tower has retained its unfunction. Piano articulates the spiritual aspect of elevation as something he feels acutely for his own building. Height as power, as promulgated by Irvine Sellar is the antithesis of this. Piano and Sellar may both see the Shard as an Eiffel Tower for the twenty-first century, but in diametrically opposing ways.
LOOKING AHEAD: PURPOSE AND POLITICS
The Eiffel Tower opened nine days later than the Paris Exposition of 1889, after Eiffel’s workers frantically toiled overtime to complete it. There was no doubt that it was a spectacular success and predictably the most popular feature of the show. Almost two million visitors at the rate of 11,000 a day paid £740,000 in admissions to ascend the Tower by the close of the Exposition six months later. That’s something like £49 million at todays prices. Sellar predicts up to two million visitors a year at the Shard, and at a projected admission price of £20 would raise £40 million a year from the Observatory alone.
In a canny solution to a drinking on the job problem, Eiffel opened a workers canteen in the Tower. The sale of cognac was forbidden and wine was rationed, but the cost was heavily subsidised by Eiffel in compensation to French lunchtime sensibilities. Office workers at the Shard aren’t likely to benefit from the same philanthropy, in fact as a captive audience, the opposite could be the reality. It’s possible to eat expensively in the Eiffel Tower, and always was, but if fine dining is out of your price range, a baguette and a presse can be had. In fact if that’s too expensive you can still take your own picnic. It’s difficult to tell if the Shard’s three floors of restaurants will offer the same level of largesse, but picnicking is unlikely.
Piano has a clear vision that the Shard should celebrate community and ‘a sense of the city, a sense of exchange’. The first published drawings of the Shard show the centre of the building containing two auditoria and a triple height public space where the restaurants are now situated. Southwark Council may have been sold short of its expectations for the building and now would seemingly be satisfied for a Thatcherite trickle-down effect to the streets of Borough. The potential spending power of thousands of office workers, who disgorge from the station below and currently tramp across London Bridge station are only a part of the story. Southwark will receive a total of £15 million in planning gain from the LBQ project. Of that, £4.4 million is earmarked for training local young people for potential employment in the finished building.43 But the council isn’t aiming high for its 16-24 year-olds. The emphasis is on low-grade jobs servicing office workers, diners and hotel guests, with no guarantee of permanent employment built into the planning agreement.
Many believe that the finances just don’t stack up unless you’re being funded by a gas-rich Gulf state without pressures for a fast investment return. The Shard offers a huge amount of office space, approaching half the year’s total for the entire city. Besides the hotel, Transport for London are the only tenant to have signed,46 but if that’s part of the planning deal, maybe it doesn’t count. The first ‘rich’ test for the Shard will come when the dozen apartments, at an average of 5000 square feet each, come on the market. At a speculated £4000 per square foot, they’ll probably fetch upwards of £20m each. It’s rumoured that the two largest apartments will become London homes for members of the Quatari royal family. Perhaps they won’t mind living in an empty building.
It’s paradoxical that if the Shard is a success with Londoners, it might be the ground level experience that it wins them over. For the 375,000 passengers which pass through London Bridge Station each day, life is more often about overcrowding than overshadowing. It’s not going to help with packed trains, but Piano’s masterplan promises to make life much more pleasant as you pass through the interchange. Below the station Piano is carving out huge new spaces from the underside of the viaducts and dealing with the historic separation from the river which the railway infastructure brought.
It’s the mixed use nature of the building which may make the Shard the success that Piano and Sellar are hoping for. This is unique for a high-rise new-build in europe. Buildings might become vertical towns and cities, but so far, none has had such varied functionality built in at the start. Separate entrances for every function might make us think ‘tradesman’s entrance’ in the present, but could be very useful in whatever future the Shard has.
It remains to be seen if the Shard is a one-off in this part of London, or if it is a ‘stalking horse’. It has certainly rattled the City across the river, who have lobbied Boris Johnson to prevent it being used as a precedent. One of the interesting dynamics of the Shard is its very isolation, rising alone above the streets of Borough. There is majesty in solitude, but it can also be read as unapproachable stand-offishness. Sellar has recently mooted the idea that the highest occupiable space in the Shard, on the 78th floor, could be used as a meeting place for world leaders; ‘a summit at the summit’ in a room above the clouds. Piano has suggested an alternative use as a meditation suite. The disparity gives an idea of the polarity of ideologies and philosophies between architect and developer.
Eiffel joked that he was jealous of his Tower because it was much more famous than he was. It was a self-deprecating statement that was typical of the man. Piano wants the Shard to be loved too, but there is a feeling that he is swallowing some disappointment at the direction his building has taken under the Qataris. Like a man who has had sand kicked in his face by the bully on the beach.