The Shard

A shard of glass, and where the name came from

Piano sketched the tower at a lunch in Berlin in 2000, on a restaurant menu, after telling the developer what he thought of ordinary tall buildings. The drawing was a spire of glass splinters tapering as they went up. That is close to what was built: eight sloping glass facets that lean inward at different angles and stop short of each other at the top, so the building has no roof in the usual sense and the spire stands open to the weather.

The facets are the reason the tower looks different hour to hour. About 11,000 glass panels are set at angles that catch the sky instead of reflecting the street, so the surface goes white under cloud, pale blue on a clear morning and nearly black in heavy rain.

English Heritage supplied the name by accident. Opposing the scheme, the body said the tower would be a shard of glass through the heart of historic London. The developer kept the phrase, and the building filed as London Bridge Tower has been the Shard since.

Offices, a hotel and ten apartments

The Shard was planned as a vertical mixed-use block from the start, which in 2000 was unusual for a British tower. Twenty-six office floors sit at the bottom, the Shangri-La hotel occupies floors 34 to 52, three restaurants are on 31 to 33, and ten apartments are stacked above the hotel on the narrowest habitable floors. The viewing galleries are on top of all of it.

The tapering shape makes that order practical. Office tenants want wide floor plates, a hotel room needs a window and little depth, and an apartment at the top can be small and still sell. As the floors shrink going up, each use lands where its plan fits, which is the argument Piano made for the taper in the first place.

The View from the Shard

The View from the Shard runs across floors 68 to 72. The lower levels are enclosed galleries with floor-to-ceiling glass; floor 72 is an open-air deck at 244 m, where the open spire rises past you and the wind is real. On a clear day the sight line reaches roughly 40 miles.

It is ticketed, and booking a dated slot in advance costs less than walking up. London has free decks at lower height, the Sky Garden at 20 Fenchurch Street and Horizon 22, which is why the Shard sells the extra 60 m rather than the view alone.The other towers you can go up are listed with the rest of the city's skyline.

Built above a working railway station

The site is a triangle on top of London Bridge station, where the Underground lines and the national rail concourse were already running and could not be closed, which left no room for the conventional sequence of digging a basement, pouring a raft and then building upward.

The answer was top-down construction, the first use of the method on a building of this height in Britain. The perimeter walls and the piles went in first, then the ground-floor slab, and the core climbed above that slab while excavators worked underneath it, taking out three basement levels. The concrete core reached the 23rd floor before the basement was finished. It saved months and it kept the trains running.How a tall building goes upexplains the ordinary order this one had to abandon.

Qatari money, and who objected

Irvine Sellar assembled the site and ran the scheme, but the money came from Qatar. A consortium of Qatari investors put in £150 million in 2008, after the credit crisis had closed off the usual lenders, and took 80 percent. The State of Qatar holds about 95 percent today, with Sellar's group keeping the rest. Construction cost roughly £435 million.

Consent took a public inquiry. English Heritage and the Royal Fine Art Commission both opposed the tower, and the objection that carried furthest concerned the Tower of London, a UNESCO World Heritage site about a mile away across the river. The World Heritage Committee noted in 2006 that new buildings around the Tower, the Shard among them, appeared not to respect the setting of the property, and the question of how London's towers affect that view has come back to UNESCO repeatedly since. Permission was granted in 2003 anyway, on the argument that a tall building belongs over a major transport interchange if it belongs anywhere.

At 310 m the Shard clears the 300 m mark and counts as asupertall, the only one in Britain. That is a modest position worldwide: againstthe tallest building in the world it is about a third the height, and it sits outside the global top hundred. What it has instead is a silhouette nobody confuses with another tower, and amongthe buildings people can name that has counted for more than the figure.