by Occupying a side street, in the tangled maze of lanes and railway crossings south of the Thames, it is one of the capital’s strangest new sights. Look up at the corner of Union Street and Mayor Street, and you’ll see a white brick building with a big hole stuck out of its face, as if it had been attacked with a giant ice cream scoop. It’s a real architectural WTF moment that has been stopping travelers in their tracks since the scaffolding came down a few weeks ago.
Follow the direction of the two-story gable, and viewers will find that it appears to precisely frame the shape of the rose window of the church next door, giving the building the appearance of being melted by holy rays of color. glass: a face shaped by the power of the Lord?
“We wanted to respect our neighbour,” says Jonny Plant, the architect of this new concave office building. “The church has always been overlooked, on the side street 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 red brick building on the corner with an infill extension to the side, and an additional storey on the roof. The ground floor of the building always filled the entire footprint of the site, but the upper floors were recessed back from the street, to politely align with the front of the Roman Catholic church – a grade II listed Romanesque structure, built in 1892 by the prolific church architect Frederick Walters.
“The developer wanted to fill the entire site first and bring the building up to the edge of the street,” says Father Christopher Pearson, pastor of the Church of the Precious Blood. “But we had spent a lot of money renovating the church, and we didn’t want to hide. They were very happy and listened to our concerns – and we are very happy with the result. It’s like the building says: ‘Ta-daa! We’re here!'”
There’s a reason the church has always been a little lonely. For over 200 years after the Act of Uniformity in 1559, it was illegal in England to practice outside the Roman Catholic faith. Even after the emancipation of the Catholics in 1829, and a further relaxation of the laws in 1850, Catholic churches were often pushed down side streets and set back from the road. More than 130 years after its completion, Most Precious Blood is now more visible than ever, theatrically framed by a most precious viewing cone.
History is intertwined with “despite buildings”, architectural monuments against the grudges of neighbors, designed to block views and block daylight. But here’s the opposite: a surreal tribute to your neighbor worked with glazed bricks. Using 3D modeling software, the architects extruded the shape of the rose window in an imaginary cone back to a precise point on the street corner, from where it is designed to be viewed – which happens to be right outside a bar espresso, that’s for you. You can have a good gawp while queuing for your coffee. “The council has been so supportive,” says project director David Crosthwait. “We even talked about having a special paving slab on the street, instructing people to look up.”
It’s a simple (some would say crude) concept. But it was fiendishly complicated to execute. A hefty steel frame does the architectural acrobatics and a series of large arched ribs can hold shelves that support the 10 different types of specially shaped glazed bricks. “It’s like a big steel wine rack,” Crosthwait says. It looks very expensive, not to mention the extra carbon incorporated in all the steel, but Plant says the extra floor space the feat of gymnastics allows gives a “good return on investment”.
The project is perhaps the most literal example of building around a sight line in London, but it stands as a microcosm of the city’s long tradition of pictorial planning, where buildings are sculpted by a matrix of invisible beam lines, designed to range to preserve. of scenes we cherish.
For generations, the dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral has been the holy point to which all else must be moved, extending a radial network of protective sights across the capital. The system was first developed in the 1930s by Godfrey Allen, then St Paul’s surveyor, who drew up a grid of height limits around the cathedral, mainly to preserve views from the south bank – many of them from outside the pubs and he prefers.
The rules have since been expanded and codified in the London View Management Framework, which specifies the exact coordinates of the 27 protected views and the 13 protected views – even taking into account the curvature of the Earth, and some of the valuable prospects are far away. They are classified into four categories, including Panorama of London, such as the view from Parliament Hill; Linear Views, such as the Mall to Buckingham Palace; River Prospects, including the Victoria Embankment; and Landscape Views, including Parliament Square to the Palace of Westminster. But St Paul’s still reigns supreme, benefiting from protection not only from buildings obscuring the foreground, but also from things popping up in the background – at least in theory.
Conservationist eyebrows were raised in 2016 when it was slowly discovered that the expensive shaft of Manhattan Loft Gardens, a 42-storey luxury apartment tower in Stratford, was poking up behind St Paul’s dome like a chubby middle finger. Critics who envied the telephoto lenses saw little significance that this could only be seen through a telescope from a mound in Richmond Park, 20km away, where a hole has been specially cut in a hedge to allow the view. conservation. (The LVMF protection view claims that the background should be protected up to 3km behind Saint Paul, but the tower is 7km away.)
More visibly, the odd shapes of many of the City of London’s skyscrapers are dictated by the need to avoid views of St Paul’s. The angled wedge of the Cheesegrater, by Richard Rogers’ firm RSH+P, is so shaped that it can be leaned out of sight from Fleet Street – appropriately, just outside the Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese pub. It was an engineering feat that took twice as much steel to achieve as the Eiffel Tower. Similarly the Scalpel, with KPF, continues in the opposite direction, wandering southwest in a mirror-image incline, both lurching out of the dome as if caught in an awkward dance of social distancing.
Perhaps the clumsiest expression of all the restrictions of St. Paul comes from the French architect Jean Nouvel. His elegant One New Change shopping center stumbles to the east of the cathedral, twisting and turning its brown glass walls as if trying to get drunk under the height limits.
The story goes that the architect came to the first meeting with the planners with an Airfix model of a Stealth bomber. Just as the plane’s form was shaped to avoid detection, so too would its building look good ducking under the radar of the viewing matrix. It’s not hard to see why he was cast to make a slicing piece of sculpture. The City’s supplementary planning guidance positively encourages it, talking about how the elevation grid around St Paul’s presents a “complex three-dimensional surface of inclined planes and sometimes ‘cliffs’ where dramatically different sight lines coexist ” – catnip for an architect struggling for ideas.
As Peter Rees, the City of London’s chief planner at the time, said: “There’s only one development control tool that really works – and mine – and that’s a low threshold for boredom.
