Tucked away in a side street in the tangled maze of lanes and railway viaducts south of the Thames stands one of the capital’s strangest new sights. Look at the corner of Union Street and O’Meara Street and you’ll see a white brick building with a large gouge in its facade, as if it had been attacked with a giant ice cream scoop. A real architectural WTF moment that has been stopping passers-by since the pier collapsed a few weeks ago.
Follow the direction of the two-story alcove and attentive viewers will see that it precisely frames the shape of the rose window of the church next door, making the building appear to be melted by the sacred rays emanating from the stained window. glass: a façade shaped by the power of God?
“We wanted to respect our neighbour,” says Jonny Plant, the architect of this interesting new concave office building. “The church had always been overlooked and was located in an alley next to the railway viaduct, so we wanted to celebrate it and draw people’s attention to it.”
His firm, Lipton Plant (since merged with Corstorphine & Wright), was commissioned to extend the four-storey redbrick building on the corner with an infill extension to the side and an extra storey on the roof. The ground floor of the building always occupied the entire footprint of the site, but the upper floors were built in 1892 during World War II. It was set back from the street to politely blend in with the façade of the Roman Catholic church, a Grade 1 listed Romanesque building. prolific church architect Frederick Walters.
“The developer originally wanted to fill the entire area and bring the building to the street edge,” says Father Christopher Pearson, pastor of the Church of the Most Precious Blood. “But we spent a lot of money restoring the church and we didn’t want to hide. They were extremely helpful and listened to our concerns; We were very pleased with the result. It’s as if the building is saying: ‘Ta-daa! We’re here!'”
There’s a reason why the church is always a bit secluded. For more than 200 years after the Act of Uniformity in 1559, the open practice of the Roman Catholic faith was illegal in England. Even after the emancipation of Catholics in 1829 and further relaxation of laws in 1850, Catholic churches were often moved to side streets and away from the road. More than 130 years after its completion, the Most Precious Blood is now more visible than ever, theatrically framed by a treasured viewing cone.
History is full of “faith buildings,” architectural monuments to neighborly grudges designed to obstruct views and block out daylight. But this is the exact opposite: a surreal love-thy-neighbor ode etched into glazed bricks. Using 3D modeling software, the architects shaped the rose window’s shape into an imaginary cone, set back to an exact point on the street corner where it was designed to be viewed; This is right outside an espresso bar so you too can get a good look while queuing for your Coffee. “The council was very supportive,” says project director David Crosthwait. “We even talked about having a special paving sign on the street that would direct people to look up.”
It’s a simple (some might say crude) concept. However, it was extremely complex to implement. A heavy steel frame makes architectural acrobatics possible, with a series of massive arched ribs holding shelves supporting 10 different types of specially shaped glazed bricks. “It looks like a big steel wine rack,” says Crosthwait. It seems eye-wateringly expensive, not to mention the extra carbon contained in all the steel, but Plant says the additional floor space allowed by the gymnastics skill “provides a good return on investment.”
The project is perhaps the truest example of building around a sightline in London, but stands as a microcosm of the city’s long-standing tradition of picturesque planning, where buildings are shaped by a matrix of invisible ley lines designed to maintain a range. One of the favorite landscapes.
For generations, the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral has been a sacred spot to which all should bow, extending a radial network of protected landscapes across the capital. The system was first developed in the 1930s by Godfrey Allen, then a surveyor at St Paul’s; He himself set height limits around the cathedral to protect views, primarily from the south bank (mostly from outside his favorite pubs).
The rules have since been expanded and codified in the London Image Management Framework; this framework details the precise coordinates of 27 protected views and 13 protected landscapes; Some of the valuable possibilities are so remote that the curvature of the Earth is also taken into account. They are divided into four categories; these include Panoramas of London, such as the view from Parliament Hill; Linear Views from the Mall to Buckingham Palace; River Prospects including Victoria Embankment; and Cityscape Views from Parliament Square to the Palace of Westminster. But St Paul’s still reigns supreme; it enjoys protection (at least in theory) not only from buildings obscuring its foreground, but also from things that pop up in the background.
In 2016, environmentalists’ eyebrows were raised when it was belatedly discovered that the pricey shaft of Manhattan Loft Gardens, a 42-storey collection of luxury apartments in Stratford, was rising like a plump middle finger from behind the dome of St Paul’s. The fact that it could only be seen through a telescope from a hill in Richmond Park, 20 km away, with a hole specifically cut in the fence to preserve the view, mattered little to angry critics using telephoto lenses. (LVMF protected view requires the background to be protected up to 3km behind St Paul’s, with the tower 7km away.)
More visibly, the odd shapes of many of the City of London’s skyscrapers are driven by their need to escape the views of St Paul’s. Made by Richard Rogers’ firm RSH+P, the Cheesegrater’s angular wedge is shaped to lean out of view over Fleet Street, just outside the Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese pub. It was an engineering feat that required twice as much steel as the Eiffel Tower. Similarly, KPF’s Scalpel leans in the opposite direction, tilting southwards in a mirror-image tilt; The two move away from the dome as if caught in a strange dance of social distance.
Perhaps the most clumsy manifestation of St Paul’s restrictions comes from French architect Jean Nouvel. Moving at breakneck speed, the One New Change shopping mall staggers east of the cathedral, its brown glass walls twisting and turning as if it were drunkenly trying to stay under height limits.
As the story goes, the architect arrived at the first meeting with planners holding an Airfix model of a Stealth bomber. Just as the shape of the aircraft was modeled to avoid detection, its building would be subtly shaped to fall below the radar of the imaging matrix. It’s not hard to see why he’s into some sculptural slicing. The city’s supplementary planning guide positively encourages this, mentioning that the elevation grid around St Paul’s actually represents “a complex three-dimensional surface of inclined planes and occasional ‘cliffs’ where significantly different sightlines overlap”; A quick tip for an architect having trouble coming up with ideas.
As Peter Rees, then the City of London’s chief planner, said: “There’s only one really useful tool of development control – and I have one – and that’s a low boredom threshold.”