I used to hate the Shard. When it was first erected, famously the tallest building in the United Kingdom, Renzo Piano’s towering stick of glass and steel offended me deeply.
Not only did its position, in relation to the buildings around it (including, at the time, my office), create a ridiculous wind tunnel that was hazardous to hair and pedestrians on all but the calmest day, but also, viewed from the other side of the river, I loathed the way it lurched into the sky, a posturing vulgarity dwarfing all its neighbours. It seemed to me like a big, boorish bloke at a party, loud and annoying, trying too hard to be the life and soul and ruining it for everybody.
Now, years later, I rather adore it. As I come out into London Bridge bus station on my way to work, I love seeing tourists squinting up at it, or trying to get low enough with their phones to photograph both their loved ones and the very top of the building. The Shard and I are like the secondary couple in a rom-com – despite my initial suspicion, it has grown on me, the big stupid thing.
In fact, I have developed an affection for most of London’s sillier buildings (though I retain a special disdain for Raphael Viñoly’s Walkie-Talkie, which looks to me like a child’s drawing of a skyscraper, likely to house a zany office full of suit-wearing cartoon animals).
A recent surprise trip to Horizon 22 on Bishopsgate, home to the capital’s highest viewing platform (have you been? It’s amazing! And it’s free! Honestly, go, it’s the best view of London), reminded me just how much joy it is possible to take in the city’s higgledy-piggledy planning. A medieval church here butting up against a reflective glass edifice there, a surprise roof-garden here, a delightful, stealth chequerboard effect façade there.
Which is why I was a bit affronted by an Op-Ed this week in the New York Times, taking issue with London’s “jarring profusion of odd skyscrapers with funny names or nicknames” and suggesting that “the world’s most famous architects have used London as a playground, with cacophonous results”.
That’s not to say that I think that the writer, columnist Peter Coy, is wrong, per se. Everyone knows that London’s discretionary planning system is a bit of a mess, the sands shifting with each new mayor. And it does disturb me greatly that so many buildings seem to be more or less empty, which seems pointless and criminally wasteful. That’s a whole other question. But as a collection of architecture, I find myself wanting to defend our messy cacophony.
I know they’ve got silly names; that’s because we have affection for them, even if we think they’re daft. There is no greater compliment, or, more to the point for a starchitect, assurance of legacy for a building than its name being cheerfully changed by the British public from, say, The Leadenhall Building (snore) to The Cheesegrater, or 30 St Mary Axe (yawn) to The Gherkin (though my initial instinct was to call it The Suppository; I suppose it doesn’t have the same ring).
As I’m coming into work on the train from Lewisham, I love the sight of the Strata, which nobody calls it (it has been renamed The Razor – it looks like a beard trimmer), and I have a deep tenderness for 52 Lime Street, AKA The Scalpel, with its triangular top, which on a sunny day makes you feel like you could reach out and press PLAY on London.
It is one of the things that makes London so magical – that strange and surprising juxtaposition of buildings and spaces that is the result of layers upon layers of city springing up here and there over millennia, since the Romans first settled a patch of ground above the marshy Thames valley in about 43AD. A magic that New York, by the way, built far more recently on a boring old grid and made aggressively car-friendly in the Thirties by the powerful urban planner Robert Moses, can never achieve.
That New York’s most memorable buildings are still the Empire State, the Chrysler Building, and the Flatiron Building (originally the Fuller Building), completed in 1932, 1930 and 1902 respectively, says a lot about the city’s architectural ambition. Like our fashion – which isn’t always elegant or chic but is always fun and experimental and exciting – I concede that a lot of London’s big, high-profile buildings are mad. But at least they’re interesting.
So I say, pah! to the critics. I love our scrappy architectural pandemonium. We just need to make better use of it.
What the Culture Editor did this week
Unravel: the Power and Politics of Textiles in Art, Barbican
It’s huge, but this fantastic exhibition of more than 100 artworks by 50 international artists is well worth a visit. Looking at how contemporary artists have used the underestimated and undervalued form of textiles, from monumental tapestries to tiny cloth and thread bundles, it weaves a story of defiance, protest and strength. Not every piece is perfect, but it’s never less than fascinating.
Soulscapes, Dulwich Picture Gallery
It’s been a week of exhibitions, and this one is a delight. Curated by Lisa Anderson, the director of the Black Cultural Archives, it looks at how artists from the African diaspora are working within the landscape genre; mostly with great joy and affection, in fact. And there are some superb paintings here, by the likes of Hurvin Anderson, Che Lovelace and Njideka Akunyili Crosby.
