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Commercial - News From Archives
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It's a Pickel, It's a Pinapple-- It's a Brillian New Skyscraper
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By David Littlejohn July 13, 2004 At just 590 feet and 40 stories, the new skyscraper officially known as 30 St. Mary Axe is less than half the height of the world's 10 tallest buildings, and not even the tallest building in London. But it draws instant attention from either side of the Thames because of its unique shape, which has been variously compared to a cigar, a rocket, a bullet, a penis, a lipstick, a Zeppelin, a lava lamp, a bandaged finger, and -- most frequently -- a gherkin. Its architect, Norman Foster of Foster and Partners, prefers the metaphor of a pine cone or pineapple, since they do more justice to the natural evolution of the building's round-section, bulging-center, dome-topped shape. 
The building, which opened in December 2003, is the most provocative high-rise erected
in London since Richard Rogers's intricate, high-tech, stainless-steel-clad Lloyd's Building
of 1986, which is located two corners away. To my eye, it is the most ingenious and elegant
new skyscraper built anywhere in the world for at least 30 years. Mr. Foster's best-known designs,
which include the HSBC bank headquarters in Hong Kong, the new Reichstag dome in Berlin, and the
Commerzbank in Frankfurt (the tallest building in Europe), combine the look-at-me configurations
that most celebrity architects give their buildings nowadays with a profound, persuasive sense
that these shapes are the result of the most rigorous application of hard logic (and a
lot of computer time) to complex human and structural problems
One can try to experience 30 St. Mary Axe in purely aesthetic terms, in which I think it succeeds very well. Some Londoners, including the Prince of Wales, despise it for desecrating the ancient City of London; but the quaint character of the City was pretty well desecrated decades ago by World War II bombing and uninspired postwar rebuilding. I admit the round, tapering/bulging/tapering shape is a bit giddy-looking for a building whose owner and chief tenant is Swiss Re, a sober and respectable Zurich-based reinsurance company. But the sparkling glass surfaces outside (made of 5,500 triangular windows, many of which open) and calm gray walls inside are ultrachic and ultrasleek. The very readable harlequin-patterned external decoration (representing both structural members and window edges), interrupted for barber-pole stripes of spiraling dark glass, seems at first the result of purely stylistic decisions, like those of a fashionable furniture designer. And the tenants-only restaurant and bar on the uppermost floors -- with their muted grisaille tones, baroque silver staircase surrounding a cylindrical glass elevator, and 360-degree views of all London -- are almost too perfect to believe. But what elevates this experience into a transcendent sense of intellectual satisfaction is the realization that all of these exquisitely integrated features (well, perhaps not the icily elegant stairway and elevator at the top) are even more the result of tough, ingenious engineering and environmental solutions than the whims of clever, tasteful artists. The building is round in floor plan (every floor is a different size) to reduce the high winds generated at street level by tall rectangular buildings and minimize its apparent size: You cannot see the top from the bottom, and it tends to slip between surrounding buildings when seen from afar. The tapered lower half allowed the architect to open up a paved plaza in one of the densest parts of London; the rounded top softens its impact on the skyline. The white (diagonal) and midnight blue (horizontal) steel boxes that clad the outside structural members are ever so slightly dented, to accommodate the gradual curve of the glass. Except for one big contact lens on the very top, all the windows are in fact flat. The apparent curvature is created, Buckminster Fuller-fashion, by the flawless assemblage of them all. Like Frank Gehry's expressionistic blobs, 30 St. Mary Axe could never have been created precomputer. 
On each of the office levels (floors 2-34), six pie-shaped wedges have been cut out from the plan,
leaving the floor in the shape of a fat asterisk, with elevators and other service facilities at the
center. These six open cuts allow natural daylight to penetrate far back toward the elevator core,
draw fresh air into and through the building, and add many linear feet of desirable window-facing
office space. On the inside, one side of each is left as an open balcony, which can be used as an
area for employees to socialize or simply gaze into several floors above and below. Each of these
open spaces has been rotated five degrees clockwise from that on the floor below, and glazed with
smoked, single-pane, windows that can open -- which accounts for the dark, spiraling stripes one sees
from the outside, and many dazzling visual experiences within.
Swiss Re is seriously concerned about the possible financial costs to its clients of such things as global warming and was determined to make its London headquarters a model of "green," energy-efficient design -- in part by choosing an architect who shares its concerns. Many examples of this were pointed out on my tour, including computerized external "weather stations" that automatically monitor wind, sunlight and heat, and open or close windows and inter-pane blinds accordingly. Genuine fresh air from outside can be guided about and used to reduce considerably the need for mechanical air conditioning. There are no spaces for cars in the basement (several subway stations are near), but there are racks for bicycles and showers for cyclists. Remember when the American soprano Deborah Voigt set off a media storm earlier this year, complaining that she had been dumped from the title role in Strauss's "Ariadne auf Naxos" at the Royal Opera at Covent Garden? She was told, Ms. Voigt said, that she was too fat to fit into the "little black cocktail dress" the director had selected for his updated production of the work. The producers had decided that the statuesque soprano -- the reigning mistress of this unusual role, half a send-up of an egotistic diva, half a soaring, lyrical interpretation of Euripides' abandoned heroine -- was ill-suited to the trendy and physically energetic "Ariadne" they had in mind. On my visit here, I had a chance to check out this production and decide if they were right. In fact, there was no little black dress, and the costumes and stage business of Ms. Voigt's more slender replacement, Anne Schwanewilms, could quite easily have been adapted for Ms. Voigt with no loss of theatrical effect. In the Prologue (a semicomic backstage wrangle), Ms. Schwanewilms swans about as the Prima Donna in a long silk dressing gown Ms. Voigt could comfortably have worn. She would not, I grant, have kept fiddling with the sash, as her replacement did, to reveal a black slip underneath. The Prima Donna ends the scene wearing, for some reason, an 18th-century gown and wig. As Ariadne in the one-act opera that follows (set in a green drawing room with painted murals, not on a desert island), she spends most of the time sitting glumly at her dressing table in a long-sleeved red blouse and a long gray skirt that would have suited Ms. Voigt, who would have sung the poignant, demanding score with more style, power and conviction. Later in the act, Ariadne is made to sing lying on the floor, which Ms. Voigt would have refused to do. But the innovation adds nothing. In general, in fact, the "opera" staging (by Christof Loy) made no sense -- one comes to expect this in trendy productions -- with trays of lit candles all over the floor, a liveried servant emerging out of a trunk, and the intrusive commedia dell'arte troupe dressed like 1960s bikers and punks. Richard Margison (no svelte singer, he) sang a potent Bacchus. Diana Damrau was a very sexy but less than brilliant Zerbinetta. The real stars were conductor Colin Davis and the orchestra, who wrung every drop of emotion out of Strauss's soaring score, and Susan Graham as the (male) composer, who sang and acted everyone else off the stage. The pity is that she performs only in Part One. 
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