A building on Leadenhall Street has lost its bottom half. Now it looks like a mushroom. It looks impossible, like it should fall down – very obviously demonstrating that some parts of a building are load bearing and others are just… decoration.
Apparently it is being demolished to make space for another skyscraper. (I say “another” because it will be standing right next to the Gherkin and quite close to Tower 42, which is the building you can see in the background in the photo.) Given that the top of the mushroom looks about as boring and box-shaped as an office building can look, and that I cannot even recall what the bottom half looked like (apart from the fact that the ground floor used to house an M&S Simply Food shop, and that it had a sign for Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena, which I remember only because BMPS is the oldest surviving bank in the world, founded in the 1400s)… given all that, I’m sure the new building will be an improvement on the old one.
(Oh… it seems I was being a bit harsh here. Apparently “on completion, the building was considered to be one of the most sophisticated examples of a glass-walled office building in England”. Well I guess it was great for 1969… but it isn’t exactly an example of timeless design.)
But I do wonder why they are demolishing it from the bottom up and not from the top down, or from the outside in, or the inside out. It seems like a very strange approach to taking down a building.
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