Climb The Empire State Building 1,000 Times

“…to walk enough stairs in a lifetime to climb the Empire State Building, and then climb it again: One-Thousand Times.”

from this Centrum Silver commercial. Actor: Damien Leake, Voice-over by Martin Sheen.

Peinlich

LONDON.

The obvious problem with this sort of episode illustrated above is that it is just silly. It is embarrassing for everyone involved in the realization of a skyscraper to have the building appear on international cable news because the building is unexpectedly ridiculous.

But beyond the reporter-frying-an-egg-on-the-sidewalk antics, this is another own-goal for architecture.  what does it say about architecture that this is one of the few times that not just regularly-scheduled programming would be interrupted, but surreal graphics like the one above appear, and that Twitter hashtags blow up-- in other words, that this is one of the few times that architecture is a news story?

Even if rows of laser-fighting louvres were value-engineered out, well, that also sort of proves the point, doesn't it?  In one way or the other, the celebrities of the architectural profession are no more adept at spotting latent risks in their designs as the financial titans they build for.

The unexpected absurdity of 20 Fenchurch Street only compounds the already unmitigated silliness, which can only be either intentional or unplanned. Even before it fried a trader's jag on a climate-changingly-stupendous late summer day, it was already reaching the prize circle as the worst of the starchitectural sheds to shove their way into the medieval streets.

Who has ever looked at a walkie-talkie and thought it would make an attractive office building? What is a walkie-talkie? Does anyone still use them? How does this warpy UN Secretariat look like a Walkie Talkie? Don't walkie-talkies have antennae? If the building doesn't look like anything, why give it a nickname of an outdated technology?

Wheras a genuinely-derived popular nickname for many buildings around the world has been 'the box that another building came in,' 20 Fenchurch Street could only aspire to be recognized as a piece of the styrofoam packaging that the Gherkin came in.

Even many ultimately hideous skyscrapers look alluring in their skeletal infancy. Yet this tornado-column of steel plates, bulging up over the Thames, only suggested the horrible combination of the infantile and the egomaniacal that the wavy, twisty, torquey, turny, kissy, misshapen trend manifests. Moreso than even the Shard, Fenchurch Street is the arrival of Gulf-style showmanship to London.

Long before its glazing summoned a death ray from the September sun, swoops of steel swung out over the narrow, ancient streets, blocking out just a bit more of the sky. Even without that perfect metaphor of the glossy, reflective surface of a financial house suddenly and without anticipation melting the possessions of its neighbors, these corpulent corners fanned out to grab just that much more light and air for itself.

But if you're planning to blot out the sun, at least get that right.

Satellit, Schlagzeilen lesen

While I'm anxious to move on geographically from the last few posts about Nairobi, as well as received as they have been (thanks to everyone who read and shared the last few posts). But I did want to post on a particular development near Nairobi that has been on my to-write list of this blog since very early on, and which, before I could get to it,  "has made the rounds" on the internet, as is the contemporary phrasing.

[The Atlantic Cities blog is really something of the Walmart of Architecture Blogs. It's the clearest example in this corner of the internet just how different and more corporate blogging is, in the barely half-decade since the medium of the blog became common. The once-revered Atlantic magazine, in its post-print plans, seems more intent on catching hourly page-views than the slower-paced, higher-intellect journalism that its paper version pioneered in an earlier century.]

"Kenya's Konza Tech City" is one of several new satellite cities planned across the continent of Africa. Inexplicably, it was CNN.com, of all places, that did a run-down of several of the more prominent of these new-built towns in Africa earlier this year, although the lede, "A glimpse of Africa's Urban future or utopian fantasies?" embodies everything brain-dead about that entire news franchise. I have mentioned some of these developments before, in one of my first blog posts, which was a massively verbose run-down on the extra-continental perceptions of African Architecture, c.2010, but I did not focus on these new satellite cities at length.

Inspired by his visit to Silicon Valley in the United States, the home of the U.S. high-tech industry, [Information Minister] Ndemo says the project aims to attract international investors who either cannot find space in overcrowded downtown Nairobi, or who cannot find buildings that meet their standards.  

 "Kenya's $7bn Technopolis," a new development planned 60km southeast of the Kenyan capital as part of the government's "Vision 2030," seeks to pump up GDP growth to 10% per year and create hundreds of thousands of jobs, and, to hear the marketing video, transform Kenya and Africa, namely by inventing an East African Silicon Valley outside of Nairobi, thereby making Kenya a global hub for IT and call centers. Ground-breaking was delayed several times, but is apparently underway. Here is the promotion video:

Konza, and the other satellite instant cities which are springing up across Africa, manifest the vanguard financial forces that have arrived on the continent, viewing Africa as the final outpost for growth-busting capitalism, and replicate the collusional model of state-facilitated, investor-and-debt-sponsored property-development which occurs elsewhere. 

These satellite cities hope to tackle two different aspects: accommodating urbanization and creating modern cities to complement development. They also seek to embrace their respective countries' advantages. For instance, Konza City in Nairobi, Kenya is a multi-billion dollar ICT city park. The Kenyan Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Information and Communication expects Konza City to be Africa’s home of computerization, the equivalent of Silicon Valley in California, complete with skyscrapers, business centers, international schools and hospitals. It is no secret that Nairobi aspires to be the technology hub of East Africa. 

 The main parameters of Konza and Africa's other satellite districts are the same: a vast zone on the edge of the existing metropolis, transformed in the glossy renderings of business parks and condo towers, and breezy copy, serving as both real-estate boosterism and political spin, boasting the number of jobs, the number of square miles or hectares under transformation, the population in some far-off decade, the square footage of various purposes, above all class-A office space, the number of luxury hotel rooms, the number of condos, and of course the height of the tallest, iconic building.

Satellite cities are driven by business developers and as a result are being promoted by businesses and are consequently labeled as the future of well-organized urban spaces.

It is the banality of these dual replications that is repellently fascinating: the outmoded, debt-lead financial schemes (and the corruption that pervades such machines), realized through outmoded, unsustainable design schemes (as much as they are marketed as "green").

These new cities are openly being sold as flight from the old city center, which, with its dated buildings and poor people, is deemed unsuitable for contemporary lifestyles and business. It is central Nairobi as downtown Detroit. The internet-technology-as-economic-savior trope, while no less realistic, is only slightly less out of date. Under such narratives, it may be therefore less surprising but no less outrageous,  when local Kenyan press reveals that the government has sought to specifically outlaw slums within 10-km of Konza, a sweeping radius that is experiencing rampant property speculation among the elites. The proposed high-speed rail line, non-stop from Konza to Nairobi's international airport, bypassing any actual interaction the people or economy outside of the gated city, is more evidence of the logic that governs this development.

Aesthetically, what is perhaps the most ridiculous aspect of Konza City's marketing package is also its most revealing: the random appearance of Dubai's twin Emirates towers at the town center and, even more hilariously, the presence of Montreal's Olympic Stadium as Konza's sports facility. The fiscal catastrophe of the Montreal Olympics is forgotten in favor of the futuristic icon of recreation and revenue-generation via professional sports and sport-event hosting facilities; and there is simply no higher nirvana in dreams developing-world urban growth than Dubai. While the prominent placement of copies of other cities buildings in the renderings of Konza may simply be the result of lazy draughting-by-Google-image-search, but the symbolism is inadvertently perfect.

The Konza e-city will come complete with skyscrapers, hotels, international schools, a world-class hospital, a financial district, a high-speed mass transport system and integrated infrastructure. It will put the capital city’s CBD completely in the shade as it will come with smart fully-computerised buildings, thoroughfares and other infrastructure. Coming on top of other Vision 2030 infrastructure and ICT rollouts, Konza e-city will be the jewel in the crown of a new and completely transformed Kenya.

It has the potential to create 100,000 jobs, the vast majority of them in the Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) sector. The comparison with India in the FT headline story on Kenya is indeed a suggestion that Konza e-city could well become a global call centre, placing Kenya in the big leagues of the digital world economy.  --quoted from this website

The startling, dispiriting realization at Konza and elsewhere is, that the final frontiers of human economic and community development are being radically realized as sloppy copies of the dysfunctional, and discredited spatial and financial structures of the most unsustainable cities elsewhere. If Dubai and Phoenix, Atlanta and Abu Dhabi, Dallas and Doha are seen as ecological and social catastrophes, then it is all the more dispiriting to find that dozens, perhaps hundreds of cities are rushing to be made in their image, right down to the shapes of their skylines.

Munchin' in München

MUNICH.

Just a few days after departing Frankfurt, still in an inspired daze from the experiential overload the Deutsches Architekturmuseum's exhibit on building models, I was walking the streets of Munich, but still imagining miniature landscapes of ancient Pompeii or the visionary fantasy of Isozaki's metabolist metropolis.

One of the best models, as I mentioned in the post about the exhibit, was the square slice of mid-town Manhattan, bustling with traffic. This realistic rectangle of real estate was dominated firstly by the iconic Chrysler Building, but also by the MetLife building, the bulky brutalist block which has been featured on Bauzeitgeist before when reviewing an excellent book about the building.

Aside from my admiration for the old Pan Am Building, the much-hated "Monster that Ate Park Avenue," the area around Ground Center Station in New York is of particular fondness to me as it was the old location of the headquarters office for the company that I work for, and it was from my office window that I could look out at the MetLife, the Chrysler, and the station at about the same height as the viewer of the model at the Frankfurt museum.

It was therefore startling to encounter the familiar mass of the MetLife. A window of a jeweler in a fashionable street near the Frauenkirche featured a model of midtown, with the Metlife Building broadly featured, a cutout of the archways of the Grand Central at its feet. "MetLife" had been changed to MetLove, but otherwise the old Pan Am had been faithfully recreated--the Chrysler was not included in the scene. As surprised as I was to see a miniature of the building twice in a week in two different German cities, its remarkable that the much-derided building is here used as a recognizable symbol of New York.

Such careful imitations, even if intended for the utility of accurate depiction, nonetheless seem to yield to some begrudging admiration of the building. I thought about this curious near-irony when looking at the large model of the Grand Central Area at the museum in Frankfurt.

As much as the Pan Am has been long loathed, the dark-bronze Hyatt Hotel to the immediate east of Grand Central Station has been attacked by architects as being equally hideous: critics trot out the old box-the-nearby-masterpiece-came-in trope and decry the reflective-brown skin, which enclosed the old hotel when Trump rescued it from bankruptcy in 1980. 

Looking at the Hyatt from a helicopter height, however, even if its is really on a 2nd-floor gallery of a German museum, I could help but admire the care that the model maker had put into accurately assembling the mannequin, and how nice it looked amongst the other buildings of the area, and how little I had paid attention to the building in those days when I was in and out of an office tower across the street.

The Most Architectural Country on CNN

Another post-Soviet, Eurasian state that has both built iconic architecture and made these landmarks the central focus of advertisements shown on CNN is the Republic of Georgia. There are several advertisements for the Republic of Georgia that have appeared on CNN over the last few years. Recent iterations (many viewable, but not embeddible from the Invest in Georgia website) such as the one titled Why Georgia is Different showcase the country's recently completed glass halls and gilded towers. Another, not posted to the site, shows one the country's 80 newly-constructed, glass-enclosed police stations, and underscores this architectural metaphor as part of the state's commitment to transparency and anti-corruption.

Georgia is fairly unique as a small, developing country without any particular resource boom that has undertaken a nationwide construction of new public facilities. While this might make the pages of the Financial Times, that the Republic's recent buildings feature the stylish attempts at avant-garde form-making from such celebrity firms as UNStudio and J. Meyer H. make this fertile eye-candy for the light-speed semi-pro architectural blogosphere, the universe of DesignBoom and its siblings.

Police Station in Mestia, Georgia. 

Designed by Jurgen Mayer H. images via this website, April 2012.

 Terminal Building for the Airport at Mestia, Georgia. 

Designed by Jurgen Meyer H. Via Dezeen, November 2011.

This has given the leading architecture blogs a little geographic variety in their usual line up: The Fox Is Black recently featured a rest stop along a Caucasian highway designed by J. Meyer H., and last November FastCo Design decided on titling a post: Georgia Builds the World's Wackiest Border Crossing (the childish title is actually better than the horrid copy of the rest of post), which featured another JMH design of what is certainly rather delightful for a border crossing, although it adheres to the cookie-cutter mold look that makes JMH's buildings more punny than clever.

Border Checkpoint at Sarpi, Georgia. 

Designed by Jurgen Mayer H. images via Dezeen, January 2011.

 The 'Georgia' geographic tag on Dezeen in particular is an easy reference for Georgia's new landmarks. That Georgia's remote airfields have luscious terminal halls worthy of Wallpaper, thought up by some of Europe's most popular architectural talents, is remarkable by itself. Less celebrated is the Ministry of the Interior, situated outside of the capital on the way to the airport, with a half-hearted attempt at showmanship via its undulated glass, looking like a new-built office park anywhere, but proudly displaying its gesture of government openness and accessibility via its shiny exterior.

 

Ministry of Internal Affairs, Kakheti Highway, Georgia, by Michele de Lucchi.

In a similar way to Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan, this whole effort, which must be expensive, comes across as a whole lot of marketing. Georgia is working hard to attract investment, with a website and a series of CNN commercials that seem designed solely to increase the country's standings in the World Bank's Doing Business Rankings, a phenomenon that has grown in the last five years to a bizarre fixation. Georgia isn't, ultimately, a wealthy country, and sits in a troubled region. This is before considering the fact that an autonomous region of the country declared its independence, with Russia's encouragement, and the country was invaded and humiliated by its giant former ruling power just as the first of these projects was commissioned.

Renderings for the Border Checkpoint at Ninotsminda, Georgia via Dezeen, July 2012.  

So, rather than giggle at why a border post is in the outline of a giant squiggle, one might start raising critical questions such as why Georgia needs such a monumental pile guarding the borders with Turkey at all, or whether its remote corners of the Caucaus need air terminals which look nicer than first class lounges at major hubs. Its unquestionable that Georgia's infrastructure budget might have been put to use elsewhere, perhaps more generally in providing services to its citizens. There has been some investigation into how one of these new architectural designs comes about and why realizing one will cost 66% more than the Ministry of Agriculture's entire budget. 

Speculatively, it is easy to imagine that Georgia's leadership is focussed on investment-fuelled growth, and that blog-ready infrastructural projects might have a singular ability to brand Georgia as a progressive, cool country. But these undertakings are also surely profitable for national construction companies  and land developers. Exactly who in Georgia truly benefits from this is not obviously, and as the above-article makes clear, the answers are not forthcoming from the various government entities which have suddenly taken an interest in awarding jobs to hip architects from central Europe. Whether this is all the worthy endeavors of strengthening a young, weak, isolated state, or another iteration of cronyism is not currently clear, but what is lucid from Georgia's current architectural infatuations is that Georgia may not, in fact, be different and that it takes more than a curtain wall of glass to make democracy and development more transparent.

Land aus Feuer und Hochhäuser

CNN International has a particular roster of advertisements. Most likely due to its widespread, worldly audience as one of the planet's principal satellite news networks, for years CNN has featured commercials not for cars or canned goods but for countries. A random collection from recent broadcasting includes tourism and promotional ads featuring Taiwan, Singapore, Qatar, and Montenegro.

This leads to some unusual advertising arrangements. "Arrangements" seems the correct terms as the network not only airs commercials during programming breaks, but also has embarked on favorable, sponsored coverage on the economic and investment climate of sovereign states, a somewhat behind-the-curtains practice which was revealed by Max Fisher in the Atlantic in the last week.

The Atlantic article specifically called out some unusual editorial arrangements in which former or even current regime officials in Kazakhstan were interviewed as experts and commentators on Kazakhstan's attractiveness to foreign investors.

Even before this controversy surfaced, I had wanted to post two ads in particular here: one for Azerbaijan and one for Astana, capital of Kazakhstan. Both feature recently-completed contemporary architecture quite prominently.

The Azerbaijani advert is a more straightforward pitch to the business traveler: zip to Azerbaijan for the day on your Citation, seal an investment opportunity by sunset. While there is some of footage of the sandstone buildings of the old city of Baku, that capital's newest addition, the Flame Towers, are unmissable: the towers shown no less than 5 times, and form the backdrop of the conclusion of the ad. As the names make obvious, the towers are supposed to resemble flickering fire, a reference to the country's Zoroastrian fire-worshipping heritage.

However, with their blue-green glass slimming upwards, the resemblance to the Financial Harbor Towers in Bahrain, (previously blogged about here) although likely unintentional, is unmistakable, and the effect of booming Baku having a Bahrain- or Dubai-style skyscraper set was surely part of the allure of their addition to the skyline.

The second advert shows the instant-city-on-the-steppes, Astana, the circa 1997 capital of Kazakhstan, an immense country which boasts even more extraction-action than Azerbaijan. The ad is similarly storyboarded if slightly less overtly financial. It is mainly some cloudless vistas of the capital's glistening new towers, aligned on what is surely, during the long sub-Siberian winter, a frigidly-windswept central promenade: apparently called the Green Water Boulevard or Shining Path, which is the central part of the city's master plan, designed by Kisho Kurokawa.

The camera rests as 0:25 on Norman Foster's Khan Shatyr Entertainment Center, an indoor beach resort and shopping center (again, that winter), but the footage doesn't show Foster's other Astana edifice, the pyramidal Palace of Peace and Reconciliation, perhaps because that slightly older structure has less permanent use (This 2010 Blueprint Magazine article thoroughly covers the story of Foster in Kazakhstan.

I've posted previously about Astana, and the Kazakhstani government's use of architecture to visually promote trade. The prominence of contemporary architecture, putting its "iconic" these emerging economies as worthy business destinations, is neither a particularly new or unique use of architecture. In fact, as much as it boasts of where the global growth seems to be these days, it also evinces the come-from-behind status of these investment frontiers, in comparison to more established markets. Its hard imagine that places such as Milan or Los Angeles would either need television commercials or have them feature recently-constructed buildings to reassure potential investors; but then American and European cities hardly have the budgets to buy spots on CNN, and the government would have to answer to its own constituents if its spent taxpayer money on a TV spot. The leaders of Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan don't have to worry about that.

Shardenfreude

An icon for an Architecture for Humanity Valentine's Day charity auction, 2012. 

 Around 40 architectural landmarks are arranged to make a heart. 

If the Shard is among them, it is the small, dark pylon at the bottom, underneath

 the Tower Bridge, to the left of Nelson's column. The London Eye, the Gherkin, 

Natwest Tower and even the Carbuncle Cup-winning Strata are more prominent. 

Liebt niemand die Shard? 

It was actually not difficult to find favorable words for London's newest, tallest tower in the press leading up to last week's opening, but most of the platitudes emanate from the building's builders, backers, and its architect. 

The opening ceremony, in which the Shard had frickin' laser beams coming out of its head, was actually a quite fitting metaphor for the building: somewhat cheesy, ostentatious, unoriginal, self-important, and unable to be avoided even far across London.

The Shard's baptism by beacons occurred in the same week as the "LIE-BOR" scandal oozed out of London and around the world, and the building's constant honorific--the tallest building in Europe-- is spoken in a period when the very word "Europe" is a source of anxiety in a way unimaginable a decade ago. Similarly, a metropolis that had long-since sold its Georgian squares to Kuwaitis, and its department stores to Egyptians, and allowed the Saudis, Russians, Qataris and others to own and build so much of the city, now see this foreign control as endless and out of control. It is a tower of luxury in a city and country divided by wealth and privilege.

And yet, here it is, London's newest tower, meant to be a towering symbol of London's continued relevance, renewal, and righteousness. Yet a comparison of the completion of the Shard with the arrival of the Gherkin less than a decade ago reveals two completely different receptions. The juxtaposition is an apt one: the Gherkin was the most prominent addition to London's skyline in years, and furthermore is just more glass-enclosed office space for foreign financial firms, like the Shard. Yet the very different regard for these two towers is remarkable.

The Gherkin, firstly, did not rise in a controversial area: The Gherkin rose in the existing business district, among a shiny cluster of financial office blocks that had walled off the City since the 1970s. It was not even the tallest spire among these, whereas the Shard looms alone over the streets of Southwark.

Even before it was finished in 2004, the Swiss Re: Headquarters was granted a giggle-inducting name of an edible delight that doubles as an erotic euphemism (although its true that some people don't regard the name as a mark of admiration and it is certainly true that funny nicknames are not given to London skyscrapers purely out of affection). And yet the Shard is not a nickname by the public and press: it is the official name of the building, a central aspect of its polished marketing. And while the Gherkin brings to mind salacious and sundry associations, a Shard of glass comes from the violent cracking of a pane, a shattering: its broken pieces sharp and skin-slicing: a horror-movie weapon, not a silly sexual slang. 

If the appellation is just unimportant, the origin story is not, and the Gherkin is more British than the Shard will ever be. Designed by a British architect, a Lord no less (in a slightly more innocent, pre-MP expenses and pre-phone hacking era which had less disdain for the wealthy and more regard for Parliament). Even its address, St. Mary's Axe, was atavistic and adorable, suggesting both the christian shrines of the pre-modern City and the quirky serendipity of English geography (what other nation names an alley an axe?).

Finally, its swirling strips of climate-controlling rhomboid glass curtain recall the lead-paneled windows of Tudor timber-frames that the district once had, bridging its most futuristic feature with the ancient heritage of the area: the Gherkin managed to be both forward-looking yet quintessentially British (whereas the Shard has been accused of being not just Qatari but North Korean).

In this patriotic fable, the Gherkin embodied the core sentiment of London's fin-de-siecle self-satisfactory myth and self-congratulatory mood that swept over the city: London, ancient, creaking, damp, and increasingly diminutive, had remained atop the rankings of the most important, relevant, modern, and cool cities in the world. Indeed, London, long-past its prime as the capital of empire, had remained the center of the world.

Online Adverts for Iceland Express airlines, c.2009. 

London is shown by Westminster Cathedral, the Tower, Big Ben, St. Paul's,

 and most prominently the London Eye and the Gherkin.

It was that the Gherkin, along with its earlier contemporary, the London Eye, a similarly-circular and equally-visible contemporary, that were the celebrated as symbols of this triumph. Both were cute: a plump priapsism of late-cool Brittania exuberance, with the Eye as its sister iteration, a childlike-carnival ride over the Thames, just opposite Westminster.

The Vivian Westwood Christmas display window at Selfridge's Department Store, 

Oxford Street, London, December 2005. 

The London Eye, The Monument, St. Paul's Cathedral, 

the BT/Post Office Tower, and Charing Cross are all discernible. ©2005 Bauzeitgeist.

Landmarks they became, and symbols they remain. The Gherkin and the Eye took their place among the pantheon of London's architectural idols in print, posters, advertisements, and other media, joining its elders St. Paul, Big Ben, the Monument, and Tower Bridge. The Gherkin popped up across the visual landscape of London in those years, and still does today, in the constant graphic representation of the skyline, and by extension, a city and country enjoying a renaissance of its own ingenuity.

 Above: An advert on a tube escalator, December 2005, showing 

St. Paul's, the Gherkin, and the Tower Bridge. 

Above: Great Southwest Trains billboard at Waterloo Station, February 2006. 

The skyline shows the Houses of Parliament, Westminster, Nelsons' column, 

the Eros fountain, St. Paul's, the Monument, the Gherkin, the London Eye, and Tower Bridge. 

 Above: A commemorative Kitkat bar box, c.2010. 

St. Paul's, One Canada Wharf, and The Gherkin stand for London.

Above: two posters for the 2007 Tour de France in London. 

The Gherkin is the most prominent landmark shown, 

but Lloyds of London makes an appearance.

Quite awkwardly, the Shard has yet to receive such graphic laurels. The supertall was deliberately crafted to be an icon of the city, yet thus far there are hardly any outlines of London's skyline, whether within the UK or elsewhere, that include it.

A mural on 5th Avenue, New York, in January 2012, advertising 

the opening of a Ted Baker clothing emporium. Robot mannequins 
trim a hedgerow into the shapes of London landmarks: 

Lord Nelson, Buckingham Palace, the London Eye, St. Paul's Big Ben, 
Westminster Cathedral, Eros, Tower Bridge, and the Gherkin.

Even the hideously unloved Natwest Tower, the thoughtless trifecta of Canary Wharf, the heinously bizarre city hall helmet, and the long-loathed and utterly defunct BT Tower appear more often (interestingly, the 3-year old Heron Tower, officially the city's tallest but with even less to distinguish itself than the drab Natwest Tower, has not been adopted, either).But it is constantly the Gherkin and the Eye that are purposefully included to indicate the contemporary city.

Top: U is for Underground @2009 Paul Thurlby 

Above: ©Artist unknown, c.2009 via this tumblr

 Both use the ensemble of St. Paul's 

the Gherkin, and Natwest to represent London.

Compared to the much less frequent examples incorporating the Shard:

Above: Moxiecreative sells Glenn Michaels's "Touristique" city series which shows, unusually, 

Albert Hall and Wembley Stadium, alongside

The Gherkin, the London Eye, Big Ben and Tower Bridge. The Shard is also prominent.

Above: The Londonist, a widely-read events blog, is one of the first and few to incorporate the Shard 

into its logo, alongside Big Ben, the Eye, the Gherkin and St. Paul's dome.

The lack of acceptance of the Shard is especially remarkable in the year 2012, when London and the rest of Britain, were are told, will be renewed via the magic of the Olympics. The Shard already has an awkward relationship to this spectacle, in that it actually has nothing to do with the Olympics at all, but is being finished in the same year and that the Olympic games will occur in the same city. Last week's laser-show opening was a kickoff of the Olympics, just weeks away, but one that didn't make reference to the games at all.

 The Reporting from London, 2011. 

Top: Al Jazeera shows the Gherkin and the Tower Bridge. 

Above: SkyNews from the London Stock Exchange, showing St. Paul's, 

Tower 42, the Gherkin, and the towers of Canary Wharf.

The games have ratcheted up the provision of graphic representations of the city, even among those media groups which do not have official Olympic broadcasting, such as CNN and the BBC, but also by NBC Universal:

Above: CNNGo! celebrates London, 2012.The skyline is clearly made up of the London Eye, 

Westminster Cathedral and Big Ben, and the Tower Bridge, 

with the Gherkin and what may be the helmut-shaped city Hall on the underside.
Below: NBC's promotional trailer for the Summer Olympics. 
The opening sequence shows Big Ben, the London Eye, Buckingham Palace and the Gherkin, but not the Shard.  

All of these 2012-specific spots pay respects to the Gherkin and the Eye, along with the classic tourist landmarks such as Big Ben, Tower Bridge and St. Paul's, but none of them show the Shard, not even the BBC's non-Olympic Olympic extravaganza: "London Calling, The City of 2012" whose title animation shows One Canada Wharf and even the forever-loathed Centre Pointe, but does not include this year's debut tower:

The uplifting television advert, with panoramas of the Thames and long shots of a dozen London landmarks, especially St. Paul's and the London eye, shows the Shard only for a split-second in the background of a night vista:

Surely the Shard will be more widely depicted over time, when its presence is more in harmony with the mood of its city. Its not like its going anywhere, and in the future its initial associations will wear away. But it is this lack of inclusion thus far, the lack of celebration around its arrival, reveals that it is so disdained as to make its artistic ambassadors act as if it wasn't there.

Big brash buildings often take time fit in, especially in older, historic cities which fret over threats to the appearance of its ancient cityscape. But the faint praise for Piano's feat is due to more than just an uneasy reaction to this enormous erection's sun- and landmark-view blocking height or mass. Skyscrapers are landmarks, and landmarks are symbols, which by definition stand for something, and the creator cannot always declare the definitions. For an architectural gesture that was always designed to be an icon, it is the very fact that it is a symbol, and what it is a symbol of, that has made the Shard so unwelcome.