Piano the Engineered Functionalist Strikes Again...  

Safe to assume this is the...
Safe to assume this is the topic at hand?
http://www.shardlondonbridge.com/

WoofWood...
Couldn't open your link, so here's a rendering of the building.

or maybe it isn't a rendering...
I don't know how far along the project is. I just read a clip about how he is doing it.
In my former line of work, doing feasibility studies for projects with construction loans and, so, meters running, combining downward excavation time with upward construction would significantly shorten the time the meter is running on the construction loan and so save a developer a handsome chunk of change. The bigger the project, the bigger the chunk of change saved.
This engineering/construction wrinkle is certainly an improvement over bribing feasibility analysts and/or appraisers to falsely inflate project value a few percent to make a deal pencil out.
Now, I know that Piano probably did not invent the deep digging technology that was used to sink the piles before excavation began, but he was as far as I have heard the first guy to do it on a commercial highrise.
To be fair, I've been out of the loop quite awhile, so maybe its been being done elsewhere, but if so, it is news to me.

The
groundworks of the 'Shard' are well underway- it really is being shoehorned in- as is typical of London buildings
There is another massive Piano project going on in the West End too:
http://www.buildingcentralsaintgiles.com/Design.htm

Oh, and I can be critical of the project, too...
This building will have similarly decreasing floor sizes as one finds in the now old TransAmerica Pyramid building in San Francisco.
On the plus side, these pyramidal, or perhaps tetrahedral in this case (I haven't been able to discern which Piano's building is so far) buildings create visual branding of the building. They also can, in some cases, visually brand a city's skyline.
But...
Diminishing floor sizes diminish fungibility of rentable area and in the process stratify what uses can practically occupy which floors.
In the beginning, it is always cool for an anchor tenant to occupy many of the big floors with mid level management and locate high ranking management in near penthouse offices on the top 5-10 floors.
But over time, anchor tentants age through the enterprise life cycle and either get much bigger (many more big wigs), or much smaller (sometimes fewer big wigs and almost always much less lower level management. And technological change can either sharply increase the need for face time between upper and lower level management, or sharply decrease the need for it, in which case lower level management gets moved to satellite facilities in Hoboken (or its London equivalent). And there is also the unforeseen, unprecedented change in office space needs, too.
What usually happens is that the small upper floors begin to be leased separately from the mid and lower floors and tenant balkanization sets in both up high and down low and the occupancy ratios suffer over time as it grows harder and harder to match tenants with space available, and as tenant improvement costs related to releasing the increasingly smaller grow increasingly higher on a per square foot basis, because of the increasingly small renters being served.
But there is another problem with efficient elevating in buildings of diminishing floor sizes. At about two thirds, or three quarters of the way up the building, the number of elevators needed in the lower part of the buildings are unnecessary and eat up rather large percentages of rentable area on small floors. This leads to a choice about building elevators.
Option 1: some go all the way to the top, and some do not, which means either every stranger off the street can ride to the top where the big wigs are; or one, or a couple, elevators is/are wildly underutilized exclusively by big wigs.
Option 2: building one set of elevators that rise 2/3s up the building and then another set ascending into the small footprint floors. This connecting approach is expensive and a pain in the neck for persons going to the upper floors frequently.
It will be interesting to learn how Piano handled this issue.

cont.
The underlying problem is this:
In essence, the elevator shaft, other mechanicals and building structure costs more and more to build as one goes up, but the amount of rentable area and associated gross revenues are declining and usually at a rate faster than the rate that rents increase due to higher level and rising rent per square foot as total square feet shrinks. Oh, the feasibility analysts and appraisers forecast optimistically that everyone will pay through the nose for the top floors, but these forecasts eventually confront the cold cruel world of rental bargaining and fall short. This makes the aesthetic beauty of pyramidal and tetrahedral structures with diminishing floor sizes on the vertical vector harder to afford.
One final remark I cannot help but make is that the building appears glass skinned. Because there are no earthquakes plaguing London with significant frequency, architects can justify risk of glass fasteners failing catastrophically (i.e., the glass panels can't shake off and fall, thereby killing thousands of innocent persons and making the streets around the building utterly impassable for quite some time, because, well, because there are no earth quakes in London). Fair enough.
But what if some particularly crazy terrorists, or intelligence organizations pretending to be terrorists, decide to slip in, smear thermite at 45 degree angles on the upright structural beams in the basement, and make this building fall in its own footprint, like, say, what may have happened to the World Trade Center structures?
That's a lot of glass to come down in London town.
Also, did structural engineers study whether pyramidal, or tetrahedral high rises are easier, or harder, to make fall in their foot prints by controlled demolitions--either legitimate end of life cycle tear downs, or acts of foul play?
Officials and architects in a city like London, in which terrorists, or intelligence operatives dressed like terrorists, have threatened the tube a few times, and mucked with airliners in the region more than once, should perhaps take this sort of controlled demolition risk into consideration, when building a sure-to-be landmark structure.
But even so, it is a heck of beautiful office building and one London and project investors can be proud of.
The Transamerica Pyramid has been, on the whole, good for San Francisco, despite its initial lack of popularity.
It is, I suppose, only fitting, that another pyramid (or tetrahedron), a sort of book end building, be planted in London, as yet another bench mark of the folks still insist the sun never sets on the Crown of Britain's spheres of influence, if no longer on the old empire. 🙂
Perhaps Dan Brown can write another book connecting these two structures with those in Ghiza.
Cheerio.
Where is Indy when we need him?

Robert...
Thanks for the link. Here is another that accessed a couple pictures, too.
This project interests me very much, because mixed use projects are both the great opportunity and great pitfall of real estate development and architecture IMHO.
They are the great opportunity, because real estate development is a complex process that often cannot be reconciled with context at the level of complexity that the proposed project starts at, but can often be reconciled as one enlarges the problem in order to reconcile more players and so achieve more acceptable fit with context.
But the great pitfall is: while we are often able to reconcile forces by enlarging the problem for greater contextual fit, we often are unable to scale up our systematic understanding of how to actually develop effectively at the scale of complexity we have enlarged up to.
http://www.buildingcentralsaintgiles.com/

cont.
(Note: excuse me for offering essentially the same link. Now, I find it worked, because I allowed enabled its java scripts to run.) 🙂
The complexity of the linkages (points of fit with context) both on-site and off-site, including fits with institutions, contracts, space programming, social groups, consumer groups, producer groups, regulatory groups, engineering/architecture capabilities, and construction/maintenance capabilities constantly exposes:
a) how little the various contributing professions systematically understand about complex live/work/play environments (LWPs); and
b) how ineffectual and uninspired most of theses mixed use projects turn out to be.
Now, many will point to what seem to be extremely popular, and/or financially successful mixed use projects and say, "I think the evidence is that we DO know what we are doing."
But I argue that often the popularity, and financial success, of these mixed-use projects derives from their land use monopoly for a desirable activity and not from their goodness of design and fit.
Go to the main Piazza in Florence, walk around, and then go to any famously successful mixed use project of the last 30 years in North America, or the EU, that you care to name, and you will experience the difference.
Extant mixed use developments rarely get beyond seeming like good concepts coarsely executed.

cont.
I believe the root of the problem lies in a lack of systematic knowledge of HOW persons would prefer to behave in mixed use environments, and a tendancy for technological imperatives to supercede the human preference.
In short, we tend to made design trade-offs not toward the humane and human behavioral tendency, but instead toward the technology and enterprise tendencies being inserted into context.
This is like designing a chair that reconciles all the materials, manufacturing, shipping and pricing fits with context in favor of the technological and enterprise imperatives and lets the person buying the chair submit to a compromise of an uncomfortable chair, as if the choice were between an uncomfortable chair, and not chair.
In fact, the choice is always between a more comfortable chair and a less comfortable chair, regardless of the costs and benefits.
The same holds with a mixed use real estate development.
The problem is, however, that while we know a great deal about ergonomics, let us call them the micro ergonomics of what makes a comfortable chair, we still know very little about the macro ergonomics of mixed use developments.

cont.
Humane choice driven real estate development, space planning, space programming, engineering, architecture, enterprise mix, and cost/benefit offers an appropriated frame work within which to pursue and order knowledge about the subject.
Alas, presently, the present real estate development process related to mixed use developments is heavily slanted toward enabling technological and enterprise imperatives obtained at the expense of humane choices.
As a result, not only do we wind up with mixed use projects that are functionally hit and miss, aesthetically challenged, and successsful largely due to land use monopoly advantage, rather than goodness of fit, but we learn and accrue next to no knowledge about how to do it better.