Opinion: when the Tour Montparnasse was created in Paris, its residents have been so appalled they banned all higher-rises. Londoners must do some thing comparable in the wake of Rafael Viñoly’s walkie talkie, says Owen Hatherley.
What do the Tour Montparnasse in Paris, created and developed in the early 1970s by a large, anonymous committee headed by Eugene Beaudouin, and twenty Fenchurch Street – also acknowledged as the Walkie Talkie – by (and extremely much by) Rafael Viñoly have in typical?
The most clear answer would be “they’re the two substantial, horrible and unavoidable”, but they are also cousins in triggering individuals to want for their destruction almost quickly after development. The Tour Montparnasse’s moody glass shaft was the spur for a mid-1970s ban on anything taller than 7 storeys in Paris this month, a competitors for renovation was announced which produced clear the aim was to make the constructing appear as tiny like itself as achievable. 20 Fenchurch Street, meanwhile, has just had the honour of getting the yearly Carbuncle Cup for the worst British constructing, and is so extensively loathed that several should certainly be hoping it leads to legislation banning London skyscrapers named following domestic objects.
There are worse towers in Paris
What the two of them make perfectly clear is just how unsafe it is to get lightly the task of designing one thing practically each and every dweller in a city is going to search at, every day. Both designs have been naturally half-hearted and careless, in their extremely diverse methods. Some will usually hate something huge and present day, but these two have provoked intensities of loathing that go way past regular grumbling. So what to do with them?
In its rather boring, corporate way, the Tour Montparnasse is not a completely terrible creating. There are worse towers in Paris, but they’re put into the just-out-of-“Paris” skyscraper zone in La Defense. It’s smooth, sleek, coherent, uncompromising, and by now has acquired a specific patina, a whiff of Alphaville nostalgia, standing as an emblem of paranoid, Gaullist technocratic Modernism.
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But it was dated presently when it was completed and opened in 1973 – it seems to be as if it really is from at least 10 many years earlier, a merchandise of a sober corporate CIAM functionalism that had extended considering that been superseded and denounced by Brutalism, incipient Large-Tech and Postmodernism. The real reason why people dislike it, of program, is in which it is. Even though there is a tiny cluster of smaller sized substantial-rises on the Seine, it truly is nonetheless by far the tallest developing inside of the Paris peripherique, and stands out from its surroundings with extreme aloofness. Every single feasible see of it is of a single smoked-glass erection increasing out of the limestone city, an irrelevant intrusion into its skyline of domes, towers and mansard roofs. It truly is not like everything about it in its supplies, size, aesthetic, shape.
A constructing can stand out this significantly if it does a whole lot of work to make itself worthwhile consider here of the bizarre, biomorphic Zizkov Tower in Prague, or without a doubt the Eiffel Tower itself. Defenders of crap tall buildings like to level out how loathed the Tour Eiffel was for its very first two decades, as if that exonerates other people that have also been hated but after two decades, that tower was passionately loved by Paris’s Futurists, Cubists and tourist guides. The Tour Montparnasse, on the other hand, has not acquired several defenders in its 40-12 months existence.
Defenders of crap tall buildings like to point out how loathed the Eiffel Tower was for its very first two decades
The story of twenty Fenchurch Street is a very diverse tale of woe. In terms of urban manners, the constructing should have been less controversial. At least because the fateful choice was made in the early 1960s to enable large-rises to complement St Paul’s Cathedral on the City of London’s skyline, quickly obliterating the play of parish church spires that Christopher Wren had assembled around it, the City has been a skyscraper district. A “viewing corridor” signifies they can’t get also close to the St Paul’s dome (the grimly sprawling “ground scrapers” about it are the trade-off), but that is about it.
Most of the resultant towers are surprisingly intelligent, from the residential Brutalism of the Barbican to Richard Seifert’s metallic NatWest Tower, to Foster and Rogers’ more convincing essays in domestic-object-skyscrapers, the Gherkin and Cheesegrater. So it is odd that just another tower caused so much fuss. It is just outdoors the City’s major substantial-rise cluster, but not as far away as Renzo Piano’s Shard, which, although taller, has triggered significantly less disgust.
The answer lies with the curious architectural skills of Rafael Viñoly, and his capacity to use substantial budgets and advanced engineering to develop overbearing, whimsical nonsenses. Opponents of the creating have typically pointed out the way that in views from, say, the Style Museum, the tower’s top-heavy bulk, resembling the silhouette of a drunk bending in excess of to vomit, sits precisely amongst the two neo-Gothic pylons of Tower Bridge. It would be surprising, provided London’s fixation on “viewing corridors”, if Viñoly was not aware of this probability. He probably truly thought he was bettering it.
The frame of Viñoly’s tower is itself the dilemma – the absolutely arbitrary, goofy and shoulder-padded bulk of the factor
So what to do about these unfortunate towers? Worryingly, the competition for altering the Tour Montparnasse looks to be deliberately encouraging some thing “whimsical” and “eye-catching”, though you’d have hoped that Viñoly’s function at the other end of the Eurostar was wonderful evidence of the dangers of this kind of an technique.
20 Fenchurch Street, on the other hand, has already had to be considerably altered, because the glass on its overhanging cap was creating a “death-ray” impact, credited with melting some unfortunate stockbroker’s Jaguar. The semi-public “sky backyard”, which was a problem of planning permission, is apparently to be redesigned right after getting broadly lambasted as an utterly pathetic collection of shrubbery. But the awfulness of the creating is totally inherent and unavoidable – whilst you can probably hang all sorts of things from the Tour Montparnasse’s subtly curved frame, ought to you want to, the frame of Viñoly’s tower is itself the dilemma, the absolutely arbitrary, goofy and shoulder-padded bulk of the issue.
Apart from currently being reopened as a Museum of Finance Capitalism, the place animatronic brokers could yell at each other via concealed microphones and trading floors could be repurposed to exhibit the suffering of foreclosed residence owners and “decanted” council tenants, it really is challenging to envision any attainable fate for it. Londoners will just have to put up with twenty Fenchurch Street, and they’ll have to generate some sort of instrument – legal or otherwise – to cease it from taking place again.
Owen Hatherley is a critic and writer, focusing on architecture, politics and culture. His books incorporate Militant Modernism (2009), A Guide to the New Ruins of Wonderful Britain (2010), and A New Sort of Bleak: Journeys By way of urban Britain (2012).
