Quote:
Originally Posted by destroycreate
Awesome for London. The more high rises, the better!
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Quote:
Originally Posted by mhays
Generally, highrises in London are signs saying "don't bother visiting or hanging out in this neighborhood."
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Posts like these are good examples of why I tend to avoid threads on SSP that actually pertain to skyscrapers these days.
On the first point, of course more isn't always better. London is building skyscrapers because of demand for office space, but it'll never be a high rise city on par with NYC or Chicago or an increasing number of cities in Asia. If it's not going to be the vertical city that those places are, it should at least protect the aspects of its built environment that are its strengths.
There are plenty of places in London where highrises make sense, but they're not going to form a contiguous skyline. The City is surrounded by some very old, walkable neighborhoods that are worth protecting. There are other places that have disused industrial land, or ugly 1950s structures thrown up on the site of a Blitz bomb after the war, where one can build skyscrapers without sacrificing anything worth saving. Battersea, and specifically Nine Elms, which has a bunch of vacant former industrial land and a new transit line coming (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norther...n_to_Battersea), is probably an ideal place for some residential and/or commercial highrises. London is also a very de-centralized city in general, so it stands to reason that the skyscrapers are going to be scattered all over the place (at major transport junctions, etc).
There's also a benefit in that if they're going to be standing alone, there's more pressure for great design than in cities like NY or Chicago where most buildings are just "filler".
As for mhays comment... meh. Lots of people go to the City every day, but it's a financial district. So is Canary Wharf (and much like La Defense in Paris, which isn't a tourist mecca either). The Shard's neighborhood is actually a big attraction, for its observation deck and restaurants and for nearby Borough Market (which is one of my favorite things in London). I guess Tottenham Court Rd / Euston does suck, but I'm pretty sure it was also heavily bombed. And it creates a nice buffer between Marylebone and Camden that keeps them feeling like different planets.