It might be a tulip. Or it might be a Q-tip. It’s clearly priapic. But however you describe it and whatever it is, it looks dangerously like a symptom of a country lacking seriousness about its cities.
The news this week that the City of London has granted planning permission for a Foster + Partners-designed 305m-tall glass viewing pod on a concrete shaft might have been taken for an April Fool’s gag, except it came a day too late. The back-story is that the owner, the J Safra Group, and the architect of the Gherkin, were peeved that their bullet-shaped tower — arguably the building that kicked off the reimagination of the London skyline — had been obscured by bigger neighbouring towers. It is an attempt to reassert that original Gherkin brand on a cityscape that has changed beyond all recognition since 2004, the date when the Swiss Re Tower (as nobody has ever called it) was completed.
The original argument for the City tower “cluster” was that London’s traditional financial centre needed modern office space to compete with the emerging financial hub to its east in Canary Wharf — and globally. It was to be the symbol of a rejuvenated City. The Tulip marks the advent of something else: the transformation of the Cit y into a funfair and its skyline into a resource to be consumed by tourists. It represents a transformation from a place built to fulfil a commercial need into a spectacle.