Cranes all over Britain have frozen. Construction workers are flooding home to
Poland. Grand designs are on ice for a year or two, or three. But one
architect's cranes are swinging away above London Bridge station. “No,
nobody thought it would happen,” Renzo Piano says in his soft, sing-song
Italian accent. “But we have surprised them all!” His avuncular eyes twinkle
with pride. Eight years after it was unveiled, at the very moment when
nobody in their right minds would think of building Europe's tallest
skyscraper, work has begun on the Shard of Glass, all 310 metres (1,017ft)
of it.
So, Renzo, are you stark raving mad? “Not at all, no, in fact this is exactly
the right time to start building.” It is, if you've got the finance sorted.
If you proposed this sort of thing now, venture capitalists would run for
the hills. Much of the past few years have been spent by the Shard's
developers, Sellar Property Group, sealing the deals on tenants.
A skyscraper of this bulk - unprecedented in Britain - lives or dies by its
business plan. The lower part will be the HQ for Transport for London; a
Shangri-La hotel takes the centre, and the top has apartments, with an
observation deck for the public just before the pinnacle. And at the apex? A
meditation space, floating high in the sky.
The site is cleared, foundations will start being poured in January, and the
tower - along with its mini-me neighbour London Bridge Place - the first
phase to transform Britain's most horrific railway station, is planned for
completion by May 2012. The thinking is that, while the floor has fallen out
of the commercial property market, come the Olympics London will be booming
again, office rents sky high and the Shard of Glass will not seem a white
elephant but strikingly prescient.
Its revival will horrify those who might have hoped the scheme was stone cold
dead. When it was proposed, the inevitable debate rumbled about London's
skyline. “They said they were worried about it taking away the role of icon
from St Paul's,” Piano says. “This will never happen. I love St Paul's. I
will never make a second icon.” Being almost a mile away on the south bank
of the Thames it's not exactly in the cathedral's curtilage. And those who
romanticise about the beauty of London's skyline clearly can't see the
reality for their rose-tinted spectacles. Canaletto's London was lost
centuries ago. London isn't Paris or Venice - a precious work of art. Its
beauty comes precisely from its chaos, its collisions.
That said, the Shard is awfully big - a step change in height for the
capital's architecture. Its prominence is mitigated, in part, by its beauty:
a slim, elegant spire in a country where skyscrapers, the Gherkin excepted,
are generally sawn-off stumps. The height controversy in Britain usually has
the effect of making a project worse, not better. A few floors are shaved
off to compromise, but with little actual effect on the building's presence,
so that it hovers, uncomfortably, ill-at-ease and in between, neither tall
enough to be elegant, nor small enough to be ignored.
The Shard, though, is confident. It embraces its height, and turns it to its
advantage. “It's really like a sparkling shard coming up,” Piano explains,
“very sharp, very clean, and playing with the light. Because of the
complicated shape of the site, the sides of glass are angled to catch the
light, reflect the sky. It is very light, it will disappear into the air.”
We have heard that argument before.
More worrying is whether the Shard will open the floodgates for a rash of
uglier copycats. Southwark council is eager to entice blue-chip offices from
the City across the Thames. Far more important is how such a behemoth hits
the neighbourhood without overwhelming it. The design has been much improved
at its base. It's clearly still mammoth, but has a greater delicacy at
street level.
The fundamental worry, though, is whether London needs a building of this size
at all. “Normally skyscrapers have this bad reputation that they deserve,”
Piano says, “because they're quite mysterious objects of power, symbols of
money, of arrogance. I don't think London is a city where you should make
towers everywhere. I am not an apologist for all skyscrapers. Just place
them where they make sense. This building is fundamentally about the destiny
of cities.”
To grow, does a city keep sprawling? Or does it implode? Piano sees his
project as “clever intensification - how you can intensify the city without
increasing traffic. It is nice to make in a congested area like Southwark a
building that is like a little vertical town. It is a mix of things.
Buildings can only become loved by the public when they are able to go
there, when they are not mysterious objects. They are alive. That is what
makes a city.”
It may be a mass of carbon-gobbling concrete, glass and steel, but by
concentrating so much activity on one site, there is an argument for its
sustainability. “I love the polemic of making a building that tall in that
spot, so central a place, without car parking, that a building of that size
can survive just living on public transport.” He points to the two
underground lines, six train lines and 16 bus routes that pass through
London Bridge.
But the London Mayor, Boris Johnson, is at best ambivalent about skyscrapers -
often hostile before he became mayor, rather more pragmatic now that he's in
City Hall. The building's completion date, May 2012, happens to be around
the time of the next mayoral election.
It makes no sense, Piano says, to oppose skyscrapers full stop. “As an
architect I judge each specific case according to its evidence, and this
building makes sense. You have my word - I would not do it if I did not
believe in it.”
Piano had his moment of controversy nearly 40 years ago when he won, with
Richard Rogers, the competition to build the most infamous building of the
1970s, the Pompidou Centre in Paris. Both were almost unknown
thirtysomethings. “We were very young. We were bad boys. We looked like the
Beatles, you know, long hair, beard, flares. So we decided to be free. We
were not going to win, so what did it matter?”
But win they did, their provocative building capturing the post-1968 mood with
its machine-aesthetic, and its culture-for-all philosophy. “Until then we
had never built anything that lasted longer than six months. But we visited
President Pompidou and he said this building had to last 500 years. Mamma
mia!” Two decades before Gehry's Bilbao Guggenheim, Piano and Rogers
invented the iconic cultural building so ubiquitous today.
Afterwards, though, he broke up with Rogers and spent three years not building
so much as thinking, with the engineer Peter Rice. When he came back his
architecture was a very different affair - still generous, humanist, but
lighter. “I like to fight against gravity.” Perhaps it comes, he says, from
his childhood watching ships - “floating buildings” - in the harbour in
Genoa, and a lifetime sailing.
These days, he's one of the good guys. The safe pair of hands. Sometimes too
safe. At his worst he becomes bloodless, all that glass and steel just plain
dull. At his best, though - such as his latest work, the Academy of Science
in San Francisco, which has just opened to rave reviews - he is inventive,
light and sensitive. If you were to have anyone to build a giant skyscraper
slap bang in the middle of London, he's the one to have.
His reputation, rare in an architect, of decency and unpretentiousness has
flooded him with work in the past 15 years. He's the go-to guy if you want
something modern, smart, beautifully finished, on time, on budget, but not
so weird that it will frighten the horses. “People can rely on us. We have
never lost control of a project. Nowadays architecture seems to be a bit too
sculptural. It's wrong, wrong! Trapping yourself in the golden cage of style
is wrong. You should not repeat yourself in the same shape. That is the
beginning of the end, you become self referential, you become trapped.
“I have nothing against fashion. But fashion is not building. Fashions
go up and down. What I do is I go straight.” Growing up in a family of
builders kept him down to earth. “Pretending to be an artist is for when you
are 18 years old. I got to be a good builder. If you can't understand how a
building is put together it's like a pianist who can read music but can't
play it. I grew up understanding that building is a great thing. That making
shelter for human buildings is a noble activity.
“Architecture is the oldest profession. Or very nearly,” he laughs. “It's like
hunting, eating, it is giving people shelter, a basic need. Don't forget
that.”
