"Looking down from the Shard along the lazy s-bend of the Thames, I was privileged by a vision of the future.
"The London of a quarter century hence would, without doubt, be a high-rise city.
"Moreover, it wouldn’t be a high-rise city of the stark 20th-century form taken by so many North American downtowns (not so much row-after-row of Mies van der Rohe as thickets of rectilinear towers) but a distinctively Cockney agglutination of parametrically wave-formed glass, faux-granolithic rendering, suddenly-silvering timber cladding and good old London stock brick.
"The London of the 2040s will be high, certainly – yet it will also be wide: a great sweep of mega-structures spreading from Canary Wharf in the east to Wandsworth Bridge in the west. These behemoths are already thronging on and immediately behind the embankments, with significant clusters of new high rises behind the South Bank, along the riverside between Vauxhall and Battersea, while there’s a general but insidious densification radiating from the City to the West End.
"Londoners are easily transfixed by the new office blocks being built in the City itself: the Cheesegrater and the Walkie-Talkie are joining the Gherkin and the Heron Tower to form a cluster of structures that have a distinctively 21st-century appearance; these are icon-cum-logos, whose forms don’t simply embody financial constraints, but also articulate the symbolic unity of fungible objects and their branding. If Victorian goods were typically exchanged for their utility – the London docks circa 1900 being full of ships unloading such industrial precursors as phosphates, timber and cotton – then our own neo-Elizabethan products accrue value mostly because of the labels attached to them."
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