Architecture

Buildings where the building is the reason to go: the inside-out, the Art Deco, the concrete, and the ones that make no sense at all until somebody explains them.

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30 St Mary Axe

The Gherkin: forty-one floors of curved glass, and only one pane of it is actually curved.

TowersContemporary

Photo by Aurelien Guichard from London, United Kingdom, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Foster + Partners and Arup put it up between 2001 and 2004 on the site of the Baltic Exchange, which an IRA bomb had wrecked in 1992. The diagonal steel lattice around the outside is what holds it up: the frame is triangulated all the way round, so it is stiff enough without the bracing or the heavy core a tower this shape would normally need, and the floors can spiral. The famous detail is the glass. The whole thing reads as a curve, but every panel is flat except one - the lens at the very top, over the bar on the fortieth floor. At 180 metres it is not close to being London's tallest, and it is still the one everybody can draw.

Where
30 St Mary Axe, EC3A 8EP
Nearest station
Aldgate · 4 min walk

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