30 St Mary Axe, London
30 St Mary Axe is a commercial skyscraper, and its curved profile has earned it the familiar nickname The Gherkin. The tower rises 180 metres and contains 41 floors; it was completed in December 2003 and opened in April 2004. Look at the building’s continuous glass skin and tapering form: the shape is the feature that gives the nickname its force.
Foster + Partners designed it, with Arup providing the structural engineering, and the building is associated with Postmodernism. Its fully triangulated outer structure gives the tower rigidity, while gaps between floors form natural ventilation shafts. Those passages draw warm air away in summer and help retain warmth in winter, allowing the building to use about half the power of a comparable tower.
This site carries a difficult history. The tower occupies the former locations of the Baltic Exchange and the Chamber of Shipping, both extensively damaged in the 1992 Baltic Exchange bombing. The earlier exchange’s glass dome survives as an influence in the tower’s lens-shaped cap, now visible crowning the building.
The project replaced a proposed 386-metre Millennium Tower, whose plans were abandoned after objections about its scale and effect on flight paths. The result became a widely recognised piece of contemporary London architecture, and it won the 2003 Emporis Skyscraper Award.
