It is no secret that I am a sucker for steel-and-glass modern architecture. The more shocking, the better. In the Southbank of London, the long awaited construction of the Shard is nearing completion, with most of the scaffolding already gone and just a few cranes getting in the way.
With its whopping 310 meters tall, the Shard will become once finished the tallest building in the European Union, and the 46th tallest in the world. Mind you, almost nothing compared to all those South-East Asian or Arab Emirates behemoths, but quite impressive given the surroundings.
Needless to say, the irreverent Brits could never let this pointy thing sticking out of the river side get off with a boring name like “32 London Bridge Tower”, so it got immediately re-christened as “the glass shard” or simply “the shard”. A more adequate name quite on par with the Gherkin (close shot here), and the Razor.
