Posted Jul 11, 2010, 10:09 PM
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New Yorker for life
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Join Date: Jul 2001
Location: Borough of Jersey
Posts: 53,010
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http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/lifest...ndon-towers.do
High hopes: The new towers of London
Kieran Long
18.06.10
Quote:
There was a time, around the start of 2009, when it felt like every grand building project in London had stalled. Plans for a multitude of soaring shiny towers, conceived at the very height of the boom years, were filed away, the money to build them having, apparently, disintegrated in an instant. Workmen walked off sites. The skeletons of grand office blocks, only half-constructed and already bankrupt, stood silent; follies, a testament to a bygone era.
How quickly history rights itself. 'As of this moment I'm not aware of any project that's still on hold,' says Peter Rees, the chief planning officer of the City of London. 'People are either on site, in the process of tendering or are concluding deals.'
...It might seem curious that, with a traumatised economy, the property industry would not take time to re-evaluate the schemes it had proposed in the fat times. Perhaps the temples to commerce that skyscrapers represent might feel a little hubristic at this point in the economic cycle. But not a bit of it. That kind of thinking takes too long and renegotiating planning permission is too arduous. It's quicker to dust off old plans than to make new ones. London will get a clutch of tall buildings that were designed for a boom, and delivered after a chastening recession. There are some on site already: the 230m Heron Tower by the London office of American architect Kohn Pedersen Fox (KPF) will finish early next year, and the 310m Shard by star architect Renzo Piano, above London Bridge station, will also be finished in time for the 2012 Olympics.
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“Office buildings are our factories – whether for tech, creative or traditional industries we must continue to grow our modern factories to create new jobs,” said United States Senator Chuck Schumer.
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