Jun 7, 2019
Five Towers of Nine Elms. Remarkable how much we still live in a Potsdamer Platz world. Photo May 2019 Bauzeitgeist.
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Five Towers of Nine Elms. Remarkable how much we still live in a Potsdamer Platz world. Photo May 2019 Bauzeitgeist.
The City of London’s skyline continues to relentlessly descend from scandalously bad to even worse. The most recent mediocrity to confuse the already incoherent mess is the newly topped-out 22 Bishopsgate, a boxy bulk of yet more financial floor plates. Looks like one of those generic blue-glass towers that’s filled up the west side of Midtown Manhattan in the last 15 years. It’s enough to cause conjecture of whether the earlier design, the gimmicky yet more slender Abu Dhabi-style Pinnacle would have been better after all. As big a skyscraper fan as I am, the City skyline has become such a mess that I stopped paying attention. But each time I see it, some new offense has degraded and discombobulated it. It’s especially remarkable that one of the few successes of this century, the Gherkin, has totally disappeared from almost all West End and Thames River perspectives—for all the endless bureaucratic processes of View Corridors and design reviews, this is what is allowed to rise up, this is what we end up with it. Photo May 2019 Bauzeitgeist.
New Zealand House has always been one of my very favorites. The first project of the RMJM partnership, looking flawless 60 years after completion. Sir Robert Hogg Matthew for RMJM, 1956-59. Photos May 2019 Bauzeitgeist.