The Qatar effect

If you’ve lost interest in thinking about the Shard, do not read the rest of this article, it will only make you crazy. Because this building has become one of the most curious, complicated, polarising stories of our age.

I do not believe this will ever, in the words of its developer Irvine Sellar, ‘kick sand in the face of the Eiffel Tower’, nor should it attempt to. Neither will those happy doomsayers be vindicated, as they run around screaming (or sitting in the shade of the new form looming over the capital) about the UN heritage committee seeing this development as a potential reason to downgrade the Tower of London and Tower Bridge as sites of world importance.

What the Shard does finally announce, to everyone who may not have been listening up until now, is the arrival on the world stage of Qatar in what critics of the Gulf emirate have called ‘a sharp piece of global capitalism’.

This is not merely a symbol of financial muscle, but the jewel in the crown of its London estate as it seeks to diversify its economy, and an element of its programme of ‘soft diplomacy’. The benefits to Qatar will not be solely pecuniary. The tallest building in Europe is not about any ordinary economic rationale, it is a symbol of extraordinary confidence in London and may well prove a shot in the arm for the capital. On some days, from the 72nd floor (and probably as low as the highest apartment on the 65th) the views could well be above the clouds, Britain’s recession rendered invisible to occupants installed away from the rest of us, up there on the skydecks, in their ‘tower of power and riches’ whose inclined glazed shards will reflect the vagaries of the weather on to the poverty below.

Public viewing galleries are expected to attract the same numbers as the London Eye, two million visitors a year straining to catch sight of the English Channel, and perhaps, a way out. But dreams have a habit of evaporating like the morning mist in a harbour. Parades are there to be rained on. This one building carries a great deal of expectation on its slimline silhouette.

The Shard faces a real problem as global macro-economic uncertainty continues. Potential tenants from across the river are more than likely to wait and see, their landlords only too happy in the current climate to extend their current leases on very good terms. As the European debt crisis and lay-offs shrink the demand for office space, optimism is fading for a revival of leases in the City of London.

Hard by the Bank of England, buildings such as Foster & Partners’ Walbrook remained unlet after two years, just as two thirds of last year’s completed office space around the City remains empty. The number of buildings completed was almost half the average of the past 10 years, and new rentals dropped by more than 50 per cent in the same period.

As property companies bet on an increase in rents as the financial sector bounced back after the slump, they have been proved wrong as Eurozone economies have tanked. After construction ground to a halt in 2008 and 2009, the 22 per cent rise in City rents in 2010 with the amount of space leased increasing by 37 per cent, landlords expected, and agents predicted, the good times to roll once again, and developers proceeded without securing tenants.

The development pipeline has all but shut down. Anticipated project completions for 2013 have been cut by 18 per cent and by 50 per cent for 2014, as the anticipated growth in financial services’ employment has not materialised. And in 2014, approaching 1.5 million sq m of space will come up for renewal or will expire. That is somewhat more than the whole of Canary Wharf.

The timing and feasibility of schemes have all had to be reassessed in the light of the continuing slow down, with employment numbers not expected to pick up for another two years at least. Most of the new towers with silly names, from the cheese-grater to the helter-skelter to the walkie-talkie building, are proving very difficult to let. The fortunes of the owners are intrinsically linked to those of their occupiers. As the cost of leasing increases, so occupiers are looking further afield, with more back-office functions moving away from the City and the remaining space reconfigured more efficiently. Allen & Overy will save an estimated £11m a year for five years and at least £8m a year thereafter by moving its HR, IT and finance teams to Belfast. Once again, many are considering following its example, rather than simply looking across the river.

In February this year, the worsening outlook for London office lettings persuaded Hammerson to focus solely on retail, and to sell its entire office portfolio. At the same time, EC Harris warned that 150 planned office projects in London were at risk from the Eurozone crisis impacting both tenant demand and funding.

Those projects are driven by the growing shortage of high-quality office space and expected to deliver five million sq m of office space by 2016 with a construction value of £12bn. Without the necessary confidence in the market, however, those projects may be on hold. Thus it is at times like these that Qatari Diar is a good partner to have.

Established by the sovereign wealth fund of Qatar in 2005 to coordinate that country’s real estate and infrastructure developments, it has a growing international portfolio with projects in the UK ranging from the redevelopment of the American Embassy and the Shell Centre, to residential developments such as Chelsea Barracks, and 2,818 homes in the gated enclave known as the East Village of the Olympic Park.

This latest project may yet prove to be one of the more significant elements of the 2012 Games’ legacy, despite attracting criticism of its cost to the taxpayer as the profits are privatised once the supposed austerity Olympics are over.

It was in 2007 that it emerged that a Qatari consortium, led by the Qatar National Bank, had come to the rescue of the UK’s most ambitious development at London Bridge by taking an 80 per cent stake. By then it was a saga that had lasted nine years, having deteriorated into legal disputes between the original partners in the project. The Observer newspaper noted that the Shard owed its life ‘to a motley band that includes a socialist mayor, Qatari royalty and a developer once treated as a bit of a joke’. However the ‘joker’ Irvine Sellar had chosen his new partners well, together with a new architect, a single-minded Pritzker-winner who, in 2002, had obtained an unprecedented legal guarantee that his design could not be changed. But then this comedian made his comment about kicking sand in the face of the Eiffel Tower.

The south side of the Thames is not, and never has been, a Left Bank. Despite its bastions of culture, and some decent pubs, writer and journalist Angela Carter went so far as to call the south side ‘the bastard side of Old Father Thames’. Yet the development of a priapic shard of glass, 90,000 sq m across 72 floors in a 310m-high vertical city, will surely, and finally, prick the complacency of the north bank.

The nucleus of a new quartier, its impact on the urban fabric and transport, the office market and the tourist routes, will underwrite the regeneration of a downbeat district of despair that has surrounded one of London’s busiest railway stations for generations. The Shard marks the frontier between the brave new world of City Hall and the residential hinterland of Bermondsey, always a poor relation to the City.

Originally drawn on the back of a napkin in a Berlin restaurant in 2000 and scheduled for completion in 2005, this architectural sliver will be completed this year, while the ‘shardettes’, Herzog & de Meuron’s three-spired development originally planned to rise 250m high alongside, is still being redesigned.

How English Heritage and CABE could object to this marvel (‘a stab at the heart of London’) as it dissolves into the sky is beyond me. Considering the folie de grandeur of its neighbours, Jack Bonnington’s 1986 effort at 1 London Bridge, and the Guy’s Hospital Tower by Watkins Gray from 1974, together with the building’s predecessor on the site, TP Bennett’s 1976 endeavour, Southwark Towers, this is spectacular. (It has since been announced that Guy’s tower is to be reclad.) Along with The Place, also designed by Piano, a 17-storey 40,000 sq m development that sits at the foot of the new tower and due for completion in 2013, the redevelopment is acting as a magnet and a catalyst. The ‘London Bridge experience’ is all the better for them being there.

Its proximity to the ridiculously named More London, that extends west from City Hall, has already eased that development’s progress with PwC moving into 48,000 sq m of Number 7 in 2011, demonstrating the firm’s reputation for integrating sustainability into its business strategy with the first major building in the UK to be awarded the BREEAM rating of outstanding. Thank goodness public criticism that the Shard might interfere with views of St Paul’s Cathedral from someone’s favourite bench on Primrose Hill or Hampstead Heath were seen off.

Seen from the A13 driving into London, the Shard bisects a horizon bookended by Canary Wharf and the City. It appears to stand in magnificent isolation, symbolic of the resurrection of the South Bank it will surely presage. Even close to, when viewed from the Millennium Bridge, the Shard appears far less overwhelming than the Barbican towers that are a backdrop to the view of St Paul’s in the opposite direction.

Juxtaposed with Tower Bridge it will become an icon for London, so much better than views of the City from the bridge that have the execrable Minster Court as some Darth Vader backdrop to the Tower of London. So why all the fuss? What is the problem? The Corporation of London is none too happy about it – which I should have thought is one definite reason to support it.

From high up in the City’s towers, 90,000 bankers and financiers look down on the Thames and at what was once a great port, remembered today principally in the colourful names where steamers and clippers once moored: Canary Wharf, Canada Square, West India Quay. Just as Britain’s most successful
industry, its biggest exporter, taxpayer and provider of well-paid jobs, is housed in towers that rose from the ashes of what was once the world’s busiest port to house financial services, we are reminded that market dominance can be ephemeral. Once again, Barclays Capital has warned that a skyscraper building boom always precedes an impending economic correction, the ‘unhealthy correlation’ between construction of the world’s tallest and impending financial crises over the past 140 years. It pointed to China, with more than half the 124 skyscrapers now under construction worldwide, and to India, where 14 are being built to add to just two that exist already.

Such clusters apparently coincide with easy credit, excessive optimism, and rising land prices that frequently occur before markets correct themselves. From the world’s first – the Equitable Life Building in New York completed in 1873, that coincided with a five-year recession – to the Chrysler and Empire State buildings preceding the 1929 crash, the Petronas Towers in 1997 that coincided with the Asian financial crisis, through to the completion of the Burj Khalifa that marked Dubai’s financial difficulties (and its eventual bail out by neighbour Abu Dhabi), this has become a truism.

So some would look to the Shard with concern. This etiolated, elongated pyramid beside the Thames is a huge spike shooting up from the river, but like an icicle it sends the shivers down the spines of those commentators looking only for more doom following their Greek euro-crisis hangover.

It has been called commercially absurd, but then, in Qatari hands, the Shard is a great deal more than short-term profit and loss, more than the unremitting march of economics, more than a glinting stab at the heart of the City. This is not about mere money; this is high profile.

Qataris never do anything too fast. It is one of the things I like about them. At a time when much of the Gulf’s propaganda emphasised modernity, Qatar publicised its old fort, fishermen, ruins, clock tower, and dhows; where others showed off their refineries, it displayed folklore. As fearful of losing its past as it was about its future, Qatar was always different. For a start, it had little in the way of oil reserves (it had gas). And when the United Arab Emirates was formed, it seceded from the arrangement at the very last minute.

The Diwan Al Amiri, a complex that is the symbolic, ceremonial and administrative centre of Qatar, stands on an elevated rise overlooking the waters of the Gulf on the site of a historic fort, Qal’at al Bida. Since its construction it has become the focus of development in the capital city of Doha. A strategy for urban development was drawn up in the early Seventies, and a masterplan for signature buildings was established shortly afterwards, with a string of competitions for new ministry buildings. The Technical Office of the Diwan, under the direction of Hisham Qaddumi, project-managed many of the construction projects of the Seventies and Eighties and plotted the future development of those that have subsequently appeared along a corniche that sweeps around the harbour.

For years this stretch of road was an illusion, several empty kilometres-worth gliding away from the pyramid-shaped Sheraton hotel, the only distraction the occasional dhow and Cadillac. Qaddumi’s office took responsibility for the Diwan plan, working with the British interior designers Tessa Kennedy and Michael Sumner. For a man as hyper-active and driven as Qaddumi, someone who never wasted a second, he saw it as part of his mission to slow things down. Everything was happening too fast he would say, standards were too low; he simply wanted the best. For himself, as journalist and travel writer Jonathan Raban observed capturing the man succinctly, that meant that his cigars came from Cuba, his clothes from Paris, his shoes from Italy, his language from Harvard Business School and MIT.

For Doha, even back in the Seventies, he was pencilling in Kenzo Tange and IM Pei for buildings. James Stirling and Michael Wilford were in a limited competition in 1976 for a megastructure that was to link all the ministries in a long, linear structure. It was never built due to difficulties coordinating the brief, while Kenzo Tange’s design for an extension to the old palace also came to nothing.

But over the years the buildings have appeared, particularly since 2000, reaching a highpoint with the opening of the Museum of Islamic Art in 2008 that marked a cultural shift in the Gulf. The building very quickly took its place as one of the great museums of the world. Famous for shopping malls and skyscrapers, at last Qatar’s cultural heritage and one of the world’s most impressive collections of Islamic art would be showcased.

With more museums planned, Qatar intends becoming the cultural capital of the Gulf, a role it will seek ahead of the world’s single largest concentration of cultural institutions planned next door in Abu Dhabi along this new Silk Road of culture.

Whereas Dubai never had the money, and Saudi Arabia lacked the ambition, Qatar is determined. This is no shimmering mirage. A museum of modern Arab art opened in 2010, housed in a former school that was redesigned by the French architect Jean-François Bodin (as permanent sites are considered); a museum of Qatari history is under construction and due to open in December 2014 in a Nouvel-designed series of disc-shaped buildings that the architect described as a modern-day caravanserai, inspired by desert rose crystal formations; Calatrava is building the emirate’s photography museum; Arata Isozaki the National Library; a museum of Orientalist art by Herzog & de Meuron will soon be underway; a Sports & Olympic Museum now being planned to boost the country’s Olympic bid and celebrate the World Cup being staged here in 2022, and Doha’s 90,000 sq m exhibition and conference centre is under construction.

The vision has always been extravagant, the balance between modernisation and Islam carefully maintained as a new narrative is constructed, a narrative that wields an outsize influence in Arab politics.

The late Anthony Shadid, the Middle East correspondent for the New York Times, saw the slightly frenzied skyline of Doha’s development as suggestive of medieval Baghdad crossed with Blade Runner. He wrote of a country that inspires equal amounts of irritation and admiration: ‘It has proved decisive in isolating Syria’s leader, helped topple Libya’s, offered itself as a mediator in Yemen and counts Tunisia’s most powerful figure as a friend.’ Not bad for a thumb-shaped spit of land with a native population of less than a quarter of a million.

Just as Qatar has filled a diplomatic void in the Arab world, and its editorially independent station, Al Jazeera, filled a void in the news networks of the world, so with its decisive moves to develop a cultural quartier in Doha, and a commercial quartier in London, it continues to buck the trend, to change people’s mind-set. It will succeed, despite the odd blip along the way.

The National Museum is several years late, and the original plans for a large, residential complex of glass and steel towers at Chelsea Barracks adjacent to Chelsea Royal Hospital were stymied, and architecture practice Rogers Stirk Harbour dropped from the project.

No one goes out on top; it is a sentiment that reflects the neurosis of society, the fear of age, the disregard of history. But, as in other walks of life, experience counts for a great deal in design and architecture. To borrow a phrase from American political satirist P J O’Rourke, age and guile can still beat youth, innocence and a bad haircut.

Renzo Piano will be 75 this year. He has won just about everything there is to win in the way of prizes. Few architects have effected a marriage of the fiscal with the artistic so consistently. After completing a 24,500 sq m additional wing to the Art Institute of Chicago, Nicolai Ourossof commented in the New York Times that ‘His [Renzo’s] designs are about tranquillity, not conflict. The serenity of his best buildings can almost make you believe that we live in a civilised world."

Style without talent is affectation: style with talent is revolution. Renzo continues to be revolutionary. And a superstar. The record book exaggerates; it also diminishes. There is a shroud of mystique and style, the je ne sais quoi of design lexicography, indefinable maybe, but you know it when you see it.

And it is the difference between ephemeral superstardom and an enduring iconic one. With the Shard, Piano shows once again why he is a superstar. I like the building now, many do not, but I feel confident that over time, while it may never kick sand in the face of the Eiffel Tower, it will become the attractive symbol it was meant to be.

‘Politicians, ugly buildings and whores,’ growled John Huston in the film Chinatown. ‘They all get respectable if they last long enough.’ Right on Renzo!