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Several large new tower buildings are under construction in central London - not just the Shard at London Bridge, but also in the City and at Vauxhall.  As they come out of the ground, and as more towers are planned for central London, we can expect continuing debate, probably intemperate at times, about the wisdom of the planning decisions that have been taken and have yet to be taken; and the architectural merits of the buildings. This blog will cover that debate - and you can come here for a measured view at all times. To kick off, it's interesting to consider the merits of some of the many towers London has already . At each end of London's Tottenham Court Road is an office tower building  - Centrepoint at the south end, the Euston Tower at the north end. Of the first wave of such towers in London, from the 60s and 70s, these are two of the most prominent outside the City.  In terms of how sites are considered suitable or otherwise for tall buildings today, they are b...

The model of Tatlin's 1920's tower project was one of the highlights of the excellent 'Building the Revolution' exhibition at the Royal Academy.  The project is a famous one and an inspiration to architects ever since, but I'm ashamed to admit that I'd forgotten, if I ever knew, that the 400m structure that you always see illustrated as transparent was in fact designed to contain a great deal of accommodation, in the form of four large rotating structures, one on top of the other and going round at different speeds.  These were represented by the flimsiest of wire cages in the RA model, as they presumably were in the 1920s - diaphanous enough for the orthogonal lines best suited for floors, walls and suchlike not to interfere with the visual drama of the twisting structure. Selling your project with an compelling image that is a bit different from what you will actually get is nothing new.

To the Olympic Village housing to have a look round as it nears completion, as a guest of Prof. Pankaj Patel whose practice Patel Taylor were the architects of some of the blocks.  Recent reviews of the project as a whole have mostly been fair to middling but I found more to admire than some of the accounts might lead you to believe.  In particular - having been involved peripherally in the design process as a member of the review panel - I was concerned that things that we had fought for would have been stripped out through the exigencies of 'value engineering', time and budget pressures etc.   There's a bit of that - on the later blocks in particular - but rather less than one might expect, and much of the housing passes the test of 'more to see when you get a bit closer', which so many new buildings fail.  Some of the criticisms have made unfair comparisons with East European public housing and you can see what they mean in certain views from a distance....

The top of the Shard is almost there, and presumably there will be excitable media coverage when it is put in place, accompanied by references to the battle for 'highest spire' between the Empire State Building and Chrysler building in 1930s New York (just as the recession kicked in - an issue also in the news this last week, when we were told that a wave of tall buildings is an indicator of impending economic collapse - which since skyscrapers are always planned in boom times, and bust always has followed boom, seems about as outstanding a statement of the bleeding obvious as you could hope for.) Since the top of a tall building is the part that is most visible from a distance, and it is visibility from a distance that tends to be the most contentious aspect of tall buildings when they are proposed, the design of the top is of particular interest.  The Shard and the Heron Tower (view from the west above) offer two possible models - simple and much the same from any direction,...

Trouble with the Hammersmith flyover - currently closed for repairs after what look like pretty major defects were found in the structure - makes one ponder on London's major motorway infrastructure, or rather the lack of it.  Paris got its Peripherique in the 1960s.  Equivalent plans for London were drawn up at that time, but only small parts of a proposed inner motorway box were ever implemented, such as the West Cross Route spur road next to Westfield in West London, and the East Cross Route at Hackney Wick.  These, together with the Hammersmith flyover and the elevated part of the A40, are among the few big-scale postwar road structures that were built close to the city centre. It's not hard, looking at a map of London, to join the dots between the bits that were built and work out where to put most of London's peripherique, but there are a few places where there's no obvious way through.  You can draw your own route and check your work on a rather wonderful webs...