It’s an inescapable sensation, unavoidable when it happens and staggering when it does. You disembark at London Bridge on a grey morning, and there, somewhere between your feet and the indifferent sky, is the Shard. A shining needle, a glass pyramid, 310 metres of engineering reaching like a prayer to the heavens. The Shard has become an icon of the capital, its presence now so iconic and inimitable that it feels as if it’s always been here, part of the fabric of London and the two thousand years of human history before it. To think that this is not the case, to appreciate the wilful arrogance, the monumental ego, and the chutzpah required to bend an entire city to your design, is to begin to understand just how extraordinary an achievement The Shard is.
You do not have to take my word for it. Here are three men who should know. Jose Manuel Lara, Chairman of the Spanish publishing company Grupo Planeta, in 2006 said of Renzo Piano’s design for The Shard: “It will be the tallest building in Europe. In sheer size, it’s a crazy, insane project.” Two years later, Mace Group’s former chief executive John Mattingly was even more emphatic: “In terms of engineering, it is the most demanding building project in the UK.” And in 2015, as he marked the building’s completion, then Mayor of London Boris Johnson waxed almost Shakespearean in his praise of The Shard: “The Shard is the most gleaming, glittering, sky-piercing lighthouse ever constructed anywhere in the universe.”
Renzo Piano: architect of dreams and towers
Renzo Piano was born in Genoa in 1937, the son of a builder and contractor. In his native Italy, Piano was one of many architects jostling to make a name for themselves in the post-war construction industry. Piano worked as a draughtsman in the office of the Milan-based architect and designer Franco Albini, but it was his brief period working for the rationalist architect Louis Kahn that was to have the most lasting impact on the young Italian’s aesthetic and approach. Piano formed a long and fruitful partnership with Richard Rogers in 1970. Together the pair worked on projects that have since become architectural icons in their own right, most notably the Centre Pompidou in Paris. In 1998, Piano went solo.
By the end of the century he was one of the most successful architects working in Europe, an established name with projects in every corner of the globe. His design for The Shard was part of a broader ambition to change the face of the British capital, making it a more international city, more attractive to tourists and business alike, and recognising that a truly world-class city needed world-class buildings.
Piano first proposed the Shard concept in 2001. His original design was considerably taller than the finished building; at 312 metres with 106 storeys, the 2001 Shard was taller than all but five buildings in the world at the time. The Shard took three years to construct, from 2009 to 2012. At its peak, construction activity on the building involved 1,000 workers and seven 24-hour shifts operating every day of the week. The building is primarily constructed of concrete, with a hybrid steel-and-concrete structure on the outside. 11,000 glass panels were used to construct the distinctive facade. The Shard is now home to offices, restaurants, a hotel, apartments and public viewing galleries. Construction cost an estimated £736 million. The Shard is a bold tower and Piano’s finest hour, but it is as much testament to the skill and ingenuity of UK civil engineering that the building exists at all.
A new kind of tower
British building codes and regulations generally hold up admirably when compared to their international equivalents. The Shard was a big reason why. Prior to the Shard, the UK had no big, glass, steel and concrete boxes scraping the sky. There were tall buildings in London of course – London is a tall city by European standards – but what the construction industry had never had to grapple with before The Shard was a building this tall, this complicated, this far above the streets. The Shard was a generational challenge for UK construction professionals, architects, and in particular engineers.
This building didn’t just ask civil engineers to innovate, to solve problems never encountered before; The Shard demanded UK civil engineering work at a level of technical, logistical and organisational complexity that was without parallel. This was a building for a city that had never had to build like this before, and it would need a brand new kind of engineering to make it happen.
When a big building is built on a busy site
The Shard’s construction presented engineers with a set of problems to solve that were extraordinary even by the demanding standards of big-city engineering. The first of these was a foundation problem. Clay, London clay to be precise, is a very particular kind of geological sediment. It’s a blue-grey material that you can mould, and it makes a lousy foundation material. While the clay in the capital is sticky enough that it can bear the weight of significant construction piled on top of it, the engineers faced the problem of what to do with a building this size, this tall, on this site. The Shard’s construction would be right next to one of London’s busiest transport hubs. Its foundations would have to be dug deep enough to support the weight of the tower, but with enough friction to keep the building from toppling over in high winds. This was one of the first issues the engineers would have to tackle. With its mass and its relative lack of friction, London clay was never going to be an easy answer to the problem.
Another reason it was tough was that The Shard would be built on a constrained site. You don’t get many big plots of land in London. The Shard’s plot was right by the river and not far from London Bridge station, but what you see in the picture above is just the beginning of the construction. The base of The Shard extends well down into the ground below street level, and in fact much of the construction work for this building took place in this lower section. In this part of London, right next to the station itself, there were a whole series of different Underground lines running around the area, in all directions. So any construction work had to take place with millimetre precision.
Construction work on this scale is difficult, very difficult, but this was the United Kingdom’s biggest engineering project to date. Everything about it was a challenge, and there were other reasons why this was an ambitious, headline-grabbing building. The Shard also represented a brand new challenge for UK civil engineering: the wind. For a building this height and mass, the wind would be a significant consideration in the structural design of the tower. Winds in the UK are strongest at higher levels, and as the wind funnels up and around a high-rise building like The Shard, the natural tendency is for the building to oscillate, sometimes very strongly. Civil engineers had to work out how to deal with that. And there were other structural challenges as well: the way that the building’s footprint changes as you go up. The Shard is a tapering structure. It starts out wide at the bottom, but as you go higher and higher the area of the building’s floor reduces dramatically.
The Shard needed new kind of engineering
British engineers could draw on international expertise for most of these challenges. The foundation design was complicated by a series of other structures that were already in place below ground, structures like the Underground lines that would have to be avoided at all costs when engineers started to dig. These structures were also active. Tens of thousands of people used them every day, and one small mistake, one millimetre miscalculation, could bring everything to a halt. One of the other things that made this a challenge was that The Shard is made out of glass. Construction in London is rarely an aesthetic consideration, and the Shard is a glassy building.
Structural steelwork and concrete work of this size were more or less within the experience of UK civil engineering. What set this building apart was the way it was put together. The Shard is an extraordinary building and its construction demanded a solution to an engineering problem of a scale that was without parallel in the United Kingdom at the time. And as well as these structural issues, there were also the considerations that were specific to the building site itself. Not just in terms of how the building would look on the skyline, but how this building could be built, where this building would be built.
London Bridge was at a premium. London Bridge station is one of the busiest stations in the UK and as well as construction of the building itself, there were other constraints that applied to the site that had to be considered. The Shard had a lot to work around. There are things that every civil engineering project has to take into account and for a building like The Shard it was a challenge for civil engineers in the UK, not just in terms of the building’s design, but its construction as well. The Shard would have to be built close to and next to an operating train station and on a constrained site. When you think about it in those terms, it’s incredible that this building exists at all. You don’t have to take my word for it, just take a look at it for yourself.
Skyscrapers in London
The Shard has certainly transformed London’s cityscape. Not just in a literal sense, as a dramatic addition to the London skyline – that would be impressive enough. Before the Shard was built, London could be described as a city with a rather modest skyline. It had many famous landmarks, of course, and an abundance of mid-rise office towers, but there was a lack of buildings over 150 metres in height. Its tallest building, The Gherkin, was only 180 metres tall when it was completed in 2003, and the next few highest were in the 200-metre range as well. It was not uncommon to see each of these buildings dominating London from street level. The Shard changed all that, and showed Londoners and the rest of the world that we were capable of making a building that would hold its own against the likes of New York, Dubai, Hong Kong, and many other cities with huge skyscrapers. The Shard is an instantly recognisable building, and I think it is the kind of building that the average person can easily name when asked “What is London’s most famous building?” The Shard is also a defining feature of the city, as from the Shard’s top or the top of One New Change, the nearest building over 240 metres away is more than 30 kilometres away. From a visual perspective, I think The Shard has given London a focus; it serves as a vertical exclamation point that is visible from many parts of the city.
The Shard has also transformed the British engineering industry, or at least changed what British civil engineers think is possible for a UK-based project. With this project, engineers demonstrated to both the local industry and the international community that the UK was capable of doing high-rise projects of this scale with incredible complexity and value-add. The expertise that was garnered from constructing The Shard is one that has been shared with the industry and passed on throughout the country.
It is clear to see from more recent projects that the information and knowledge taken from the construction of The Shard was later applied to the construction of other tall buildings in London, such as the Leadenhall Building and 22 Bishopsgate. This project has proved to UK developers that constructing high-rise buildings, particularly mixed-use, super-tall buildings, is economically viable in the UK and will provide strong return on investment. As such, this iconic building has sparked a wave of development that has changed the face of both the City of London and Canary Wharf. The Shard has had a considerable impact on the local economy, from the offices of corporations that have moved into the building to the Shangri-La hotel that is also located within. As well, this 185 metre tall residential building provides upmarket apartments to those lucky enough to live in London. However, its major source of economic impact for the city comes from its tourist appeal.
The View from The Shard is one of London’s most visited attractions. The Shard is a highly valuable employment generator and as such is an important part of London’s continued status as one of the world’s leading financial and cultural capitals. A building of this stature, of course, cannot help but make an impression on the local cultural scene. It features in a variety of film and television productions, and is a common motif in photography and art that features London. It is a landmark that I would not be surprised to find is featured in more national and international media than any other London landmark, perhaps with the exception of Big Ben. But as well as this cultural and economic value, the Shard is an important symbol for British civil engineering. It is a symbol of what can be achieved when engineers apply their knowledge and experience in a precise and creative way to a set of problems that are not present in any other project on British soil. The Shard is a project with little if any precedent or equal, and for civil engineers in the UK, that is a very important point.
An Iconic Shard of British Engineering Expertise
In my opinion, the Shard is likely to remain the greatest single achievement in British civil engineering for some time. It is a building that represents more than just technical prowess (which is already enough to be admirable), it is a building that demonstrates a new era in British construction – one that is unafraid to take on problems and challenges that were once out of reach and redefine what is possible on our shores. The Shard’s legacy for the UK civil engineering industry is clear to me: it has inspired a new generation of engineers, it has shown the value of modern digital tools and hybrid construction methods, and it has shown the world that British engineering expertise can hold its own against any other nation.
When I see the Shard, I do not just see a beautiful piece of architecture, I see centuries of engineering knowledge and understanding applied to a problem that can only be found in London.
