Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.When the Gherkin sprouted on the City skyline 20-odd years ago it signalled a new era. Norman Foster’s tower emerged near his one-time partner Richard Rogers’ Lloyd’s Building and they were joined in the City by buildings of other big name starchitects — James Stirling, Rem Koolhaas and OMA, Jean Nouvel, then more Rogers, more Foster. The long-planned “City Cluster” got denser and taller. As it filled in, it became clear that not all the towers were going to be masterpieces. The horrible “Can of Ham”, “Walkie Talkie” and “Scalpel” do not elicit envious glances from other global cities. And all the development left the Gherkin as a relative cornichon in size, Lloyd’s was long overshadowed and the narrow City streets were squeezed into breezy canyons between glassy corporate cliffs. The cluster had swollen to become an abscess. The final proud nail in the City cluster, though, was about to be hammered in until, last month, its permission was put on hold. The enormous One Undershaft, at 310m the same height as Renzo Piano’s Shard over the river, would have been the City’s tallest tower and thrown shade over its neighbours and the few measly fragments of public space left around it. That reprieve should be a catalyst for renewed thinking about what we want from the City. Of course, it needs to adapt, it needs to change. Part of the rationale for (largely) excluding residents in the City (who were confined to the inward-looking Barbican) was precisely to limit the objections to huge new developments from concerned neighbours. And while there may not be much demand, post-pandemic, post-Brexit and post-Zoom, for second-rate space, Grade A offices still seem to let.The tower that currently stands on the Undershaft site is an elegant, dark-hued building reminiscent of the work of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, completed in 1969 by Gollins Melvin Ward, top-end commercial specialists. It was the first City tower to overtop St Paul’s though it was later badly damaged by the 1992 IRA bomb. With the announcement of the demolition of Bastion House alongside the Museum of London, the last of the City’s elegant, restrained Miesian towers will have gone if Undershaft goes through. What was once the apex of City sophistication will have totally disappeared, a whole layer of modernist architecture gone. The Undershaft’s architect, Eric Parry, has built throughout the City, carefully and often exquisitely. This is not his finest work. The original X-braced design has become a tottering stack atop a scaffold which also, oddly, seems to be sticking its tongue out at the city in the shape of a curving canopy. It devours precious space below in St Helen’s Square and pretends to return it in the form of elevated sky gardens and viewing platforms. These might be billed as public space but they are not. All such spaces are inevitably subject to security checks and security closures. Public space behind a barrier is never truly public.The City’s more recent form emerged from demands for proximity to its institutions, notably the Bank of England, but it has struggled to reconcile its dense, tangled network of medieval streets and alleys with the scale of the skyscraper. London is not New York or Chicago with a grid suited to vertical extrusion. There is no clamour to destroy the cluster and return to the view of the low-rise city punctuated by spires. But there is a responsibility to maintain something from each layer of its history and to ensure that the hypertrophying towers do not begin to kill the genius loci which is the reason for their presence in the Square Mile in the first place. Its most thrilling moments are those in which history and modernity crash into each other, where you emerge from the glass and iron Leadenhall Market to collide with the pipes and vents of Lloyd’s or where you are blown through a glass canyon to encounter a medieval church. To maintain this intensity you need to keep bits from every era and not overwhelm what is left with clunky development built out to maximise every inch of allowable space. [email protected]
