Looking Into The Future

With a stream of projects in any particular area coming from different developers it's often hard to get the whole picture of what's going on.

On London's Southbank we have had the Beetham Tower, 20 Blackfriars Road, 240 Blackfriars Road, a potential height increase for Kings Reach, some residential blocks at Holland Street behind the Tate Modern plus an extension of the Tate Modern itself.

All of that sounds like a lot of development, and in a sense it is but the key point that's often overlooked is how it will all go together.

Creative agency Hayes Davidson has overhauled their website and to show off their latest work amongst the images featured is one showing all the projects above and effect they will have. One view makes it immediately clear to see how well planned a cluster this is rather than a confusing hotchpotch.

What we see is the cluster stepping up first as it moves east to the pinnacle of the Beetham Tower before stepping down again to the existing Bankside Lofts and then once again rising to a second pinnacle of the chimney of the Tate.

If you change the angle you are viewing the buildings in Southwark from and look instead from Waterloo again the planning becomes apparent.

Although it wasn't initially realised, the reason for the unconventional shape of the Beetham Tower with its narrow base and fat waist is partly to allow uninterrupted views of the Shard when looking from Waterloo Bridge towards it that a conventionally shaped skyscraper would have blocked.

There is of course a catch to all this order. Once the current set of buildings are built, future development may be difficult thanks to the regularity of what already exists in setting a skyline, and this could limit future development.

With the controversy surrounding some of the buildings making up this group of skyscrapers, it's a shame these images have been so long in coming because they show that above all, the whole thing works best in its entirety.

For a skeptical public that read the Evening Standard, these images could have proven hugely useful in swaying opinion and showing that opponents of the schemes are a skyscraper short of a cluster when criticising the quality of the architecture.

When phrases are bandied about the public inquiry into the Blackfriars Road towers such as "irreparable harm to London's culture and leisure quarter" and "ignores its context", the images speak for themselves.

There are no such risks in the City which has an apparently unordered cluster with 20 Fenchurch Street, better known as the Walkie Talkie stuck out on it's lonesome and bent over as if it has no friends.

The Corporation of London has also planned their skyline so it will reach a pinnacle with the Pinnacle when viewed from Waterloo and step down to the north and south. With more scope for the development of tall buildings, what we see now is only the piecemeal beginnings of what will take a lot longer to form a coherent skyline.

In the short term it's not the most attractive of images and has caused some real love/hate because the Walkie Talkie is where it is but there is a method to the madness, just one it will take us ten years to appreciate fully as the space between it and the Leadenhall Building gets properly filled.

It's interesting to look into the future and wonder just where these skylines can be taken. How will the planners in Southwark reconcile the next generation of towers with what they have already planned? What will fill the gaps in the main City cluster? Companies like Hayes Davidson try to show us the future, but only some of it - the rest is still unwritten.


If you want to check out plenty of other images and things they do, you can hit Hayes Davidson's website up at http://www.hayesdavidson.com/