30 St. Mary Axe, lamentably named “The Gherkin,” in the heart of London’s financial center would never be approved today claims its designer.
British architect Ken Shuttleworth — the visionary behind London’s unmistakably modernist glass-sheathed tower, “The Gherkin” — declared that “the tall glass box is dead.”
While that may be a premature assertion, it’s true that a growing number of prominent architects share his view that the time has come to consider alternatives to the tyranny of look-alike glass boxes. In a provocative article published in Dezeen, James von Klemperer of Kohn Pedersen Fox states, “I think we all feel, as a community of architects, that we all created and had built too many large expanses of glass in our cities.”
According to Deezeen: “For their proponents, glass skyscrapers remain one of the most powerful and economically attractive ways of staking a claim on a city and skyline.
“But for their critics, they are gleaming symbols of all that is wrong with modern architecture and construction, representing the maximising of real estate regardless of how energy-guzzling or visually homogenous the results may be.”
Read the story here.
