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We all know that buildings don't always turn out like the renderings. Last-minute changes and real-life materials can all cause discrepancies between the vision and reality of a project. In our weekly Flash Forward Friday feature, we take a look at how different projects stack up.
Aptly named, The Shard is a glimmering building that juts out of the surrounding London skyline like a shard of glass and offers beautiful views of the city. As not only Britain’s tallest but also Western Europe’s tallest building, The Shard stands at 309.6 metres tall and hosts 95 storeys of seamless design and high-quality glass panelling. The idea for The Shard was conceived by Renzo Piano when entrepreneur and developer Irvine Sellar of Sellar Property Group commissioned him to design an office building that would occupy the space in which the Southwark Towers were then standing. In 2009, construction began on the project and The Shard's 95 storeys became home to a 200-bed five-star hotel, three restaurants occupying three separate floors, 10 luxury residences, and a public observatory.
The structural build of The Shard is unique, making it something of a breakthrough in tall-building engineering. Using a tiered hybrid system, The Shard's first 40 storeys are made of steel, levels 41 to 69 are concrete, and storeys 70 to 95 are made of steel. This system adds more stability to the building while reducing the costs of construction. In addition, more usable space could be situated in the upper levels of the building.
Perhaps The Shard's most unique feature, the reflective cladding is made from high-quality glass that is designed to reflect the sky and sunlight to emphasize the shape of the building and beam just like a shard of glass. The white low iron laminated glass is not only thicker than regular glass but offers extraordinary translucency, adding to the ethereal effect. The building is clad in more than 11,000 triple-glazed glass panels that are approximately 1.5 metres wide and three metres high, for a total of 56,000 square metres of panelling on the exterior of the building.
Special features on the interior of The Shard include an elevator that moves at six metres per second and a fully automated blind system that lowers or raises shades upon detecting certain temperature thresholds to reduce heat gain in the building. Current tenants in The Shard include Al Jazeera English, global marketing agency Jellyfish, Mathis & Squire Law Firm, and investment firm Foresight Group.
We will return next Friday with another comparison!
