The Thames is to become a ditch of cash running through a canyon of glass, San Gimignano re-engineered as Blade Runner. Illustration: Belle Mellor
We are shocked?by the news from Timbuktu. The Islamists are at it again, smashing the medieval shrines and mosques of the desert city, as they did the buddhas of Afghanistan. They claim these jewels of African heritage offend sharia law. Unesco calls the destruction "a tragedy for all humanity", and a prosecutor at the international criminal court calls it a war crime.
Perhaps they are right. As with the RAF bombing of Dresden, Stalin's dynamiting of Moscow churches and the bulldozing of old Peking, the wilful destruction of beauty in the name of progress offends civilised sensibility.
So what of Thursday's bombastic celebration of the Shard's arrival on the London skyline? It too has drawn Unesco's ire for intruding on the Tower?of London and Parliament Square. It will boast its hugeness with lights and lasers, and publicists will dismiss its critics as fuddy-duddies and aesthetes, proclaiming Shards for all time as angels of growth.
I suffer from having found London's skyline a thing of beauty. The views from Parliament and Primrose hills, from the parks and from bridges over the Thames offered a vista that allowed the eye to spread, with no part dominating the whole. Even St Paul's did not crush its neighbours but floated above them at just twice their height.
The eye has no such freedom now. From across the London basin it must rest on the Shard. Its architect, Renzo Piano, claims that his creation "is not about arrogance and power" but intended "to celebrate community ? surprise and joy". Besides, it is so high "it will disappear into the sky". Architects have never been happy bedfellows with the English language. As for the tower's developer, Irvine Sellar, he suggests that his building is indeed about arrogance and power. He wants it to cry, "This is London, this is the Shard." Now, he says, "we can kick sand in the face of the Eiffel Tower".
This egomaniacal architecture echoes the tower's political backers, Ken Livingstone, John Prescott and Boris Johnson, who equate phallic prominence with civic prowess. They are in thrall to the Shard's Qatari financiers, who are said to see it as "non-pecuniary soft diplomacy". One Gulf expert explained that "if someone invades a country that has the highest skyscraper in London, then surely the UK should come to the rescue". The Shard is thus an adjunct of Tony Blair's foreign policy, a cure for erectile dysfunction.
This tower is anarchy. It conforms to no planning policy. It marks no architectural focus or rond-point. It offers no civic forum or function, just luxury flats and hotels. It stands apart from the City cluster and pays no heed to its surrounding context in scale, materials or ground presence. It seems to have lost its way from Dubai to Canary Wharf.
The Shard was furiously opposed by local people, by Southwark council and by historic buildings and conservation authorities. It was pushed as a symbol of Britain's love affair with financial bling at the turn of the 21st century, with "iconic" celebrities and the eff-you greed of arbitrage. It was allowed to go ahead by Yorkshire's John Prescott as a single-finger gesture in the face of wimpish southerners.
There is no case for buildings like this on grounds of urban density. Their space ratios make them costly and inefficient to service. Any Londoner knows there are thousands of acres of unused and underused land within the M25 awaiting the high-density, low-rise building preferred by the property market.
Some people find the Shard beautiful. I am sure I would in the Gulf, as I admire the Burj Khalifa tower. But Bermondsey is not Dubai. Nor is this just a matter of one person's opinion against another's. It is the destruction of one for the other's gain. There are not two rooms in this visual realm, just one. There are plenty of places for Sellar and Piano to play their games. Why must they tip paint over my Canaletto?
The Shard shows money trumping planning. Let one rise high and there is no case against another. The argument that London's skyline should be an open market failed in its attempt to build over Hampstead Heath in the 19th century and to demolish Piccadilly Circus and much of Whitehall in the 20th. But it took courageous fighting against precisely the arguments deployed by the Shard's apologists.
Would they or their imitators now demand the right to build a shard on Blackheath, or in Kensington Square? If not, why not? Is it that the locals there are rich, whereas in Southwark they were poor? Or do we agree that there is something called beauty in townscape, but that Sellar and Piano claim the right to determine it for themselves.
The truth is that we have lost the ability to articulate what is beautiful for the purposes of development control. While the small man cannot touch a door frame, the big one can do what he likes, no holds barred. The clutch of permits awarded by Prescott and Livingstone is about to yield a forest of towers behind the National Theatre, behind the Festival Hall, over Waterloo station and at Vauxhall, where a tower is already looming over Pimlico. The precedent is set. I cannot see how a planner can now refuse further shards.
The Thames is to become a ditch of cash running through a canyon of glass, San Gimignano re-engineered as Blade Runner. This is planning in the age of Barclays, an oligarchy of wealth, a financial fanaticism every bit as selfish and destructive as the religious fanaticism of Timbuktu. But there is a difference. Timbuktu's shrines can and surely will be rebuilt. The Shard has slashed the face of London for ever.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jul/03/shard-slashed-the-face-of-london
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