SkyscraperPage Forum - Why London's Proposed 'Tulip' Tower Won't Bloom

Why London's Proposed 'Tulip' Tower Won't Bloom

JUL 18, 2019

By FEARGUS O'SULLIVAN

Read More: https://www.citylab.com/design/2019/...ohnson/594289/

Quote:

Surprising news came this week from the office of London’s Mayor Sadiq Khan: Norman Foster’s Tulip, a 1,000-foot-high observation tower, is not coming to the city. The project’s approval was unexpectedly overruled earlier this week after being “called in” by the mayor.

- It’s not the tower’s unpopularity that’s a surprise. The flashy but essentially functionless concept has largely been greeted with public ridicule since being unveiled last year. It’s that the mayor has used his discretionary powers to cancel it. --- Khan convened a panel of four architects and planners to assess the plans for the Tulip, the case in favor of which was made by representatives of Fosters and Partners. The report stemming from this hearing offers a fairly damning verdict. The Tulip’s bulbous head, the panel’s report said, would have had “the appearance of a surveillance tower.” The planned roof garden, a little above ground level, would not have counted as a real public space, while overall the panel had “reservations about the quality of the architecture.”

- Rising abruptly from a small, narrow footprint, the Tulip’s top-heavy column would have looked like something between a dangerously long hemorrhoid and a weird vibrator. Functionally, its proposers, the J. Safra Group, had at least added an educational component to the project (it had a sky classroom stuck up in the bulb), but there was an overwhelming whiff of vainglory and pointlessness to the plan, leading people to wonder what they would actually gain from the tower’s visual intrusion. --- The criticism of the Tulip’s insufficient public spaces in particular seems to stem from the experience of the nearby Walkie-Talkie, which got waved through on the promise of a new sky park at its peak, and then delivered a pathetically small and hard-to-access fern-filled conservatory. If London is going to let greenwashed projects through in the future, then the greenwashing may at least have to be on a reasonable scale.

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