London High-Tech Silhouettes

London towers, service systems, and sports architecture where structural expression meets the skyline.

30 St Mary Axe, known as the Gherkin and completed in 2004, is a diagrid office tower that changed the City of London skyline. Its rounded plan is often discussed with ventilation and energy performance.

The Shard, completed in 2012, is a glass spire and mixed-use tower that became a reference point south of the Thames. Public space and transport connections at its base are central to judging the tower.

Richard Rogers’s Lloyd’s Building externalizes services in an inside-out office related to Centre Pompidou. Maintenance infrastructure becomes architectural form.

Hearst Tower and the Millau Viaduct extend the comparison through diagrid and infrastructural structures elsewhere. The London sequence centers on the Gherkin, the Shard, Lloyd’s, and the Aquatics Centre.

The London Aquatics Centre, completed for the 2012 Olympics, uses a wave-like roof to present a horizontal form of high-tech architecture distinct from the city’s towers.