30 St Mary Axe (previously known as the Swiss Re Building and informally known as the
Gherkin
A pickled cucumber (commonly known as a pickle in the United States and Canada and a gherkin in Britain, Ireland, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand) is a usually small or miniature cucumber that has been pickled in a brine, vinegar, or ...
) is a commercial skyscraper in
London
London is the capital and List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary dow ...
's primary financial district, the
City of London
The City of London is a city, ceremonial county and local government district that contains the historic centre and constitutes, alongside Canary Wharf, the primary central business district (CBD) of London. It constituted most of London f ...
. It was completed in December 2003 and opened in April 2004. With 41 floors, it is tall
[ and stands on the sites of the former ]Baltic Exchange
The Baltic Exchange (incorporated as The Baltic Exchange Limited) is a membership organisation for the maritime industry, and freight market information provider for the trading and settlement of physical and derivative contracts. It was locate ...
and Chamber of Shipping, which were extensively damaged in 1992 in the Baltic Exchange bombing
The Baltic Exchange bombing was an attack by the Provisional IRA on the City of London, Britain's financial centre, on 10 April 1992, the day after the General Election which re-elected John Major from the Conservative Party as Prime Minister. ...
by a device placed by the Provisional IRA
The Irish Republican Army (IRA; ), also known as the Provisional Irish Republican Army, and informally as the Provos, was an Irish republicanism, Irish republican paramilitary organisation that sought to end British rule in Northern Ireland, fa ...
in St Mary Axe, a narrow street leading north from Leadenhall Street.
After plans to build the 92-storey Millennium Tower were dropped, 30 St Mary Axe was designed by Norman Foster
Norman or Normans may refer to:
Ethnic and cultural identity
* The Normans, a people partly descended from Norse Vikings who settled in the territory of Normandy in France in the 10th and 11th centuries
** People or things connected with the Nor ...
and the Arup Group
Arup (officially Arup Group Limited) is a British multinational professional services firm headquartered in London which provides design, engineering, architecture, planning, and advisory services across every aspect of the built environment ...
. It was erected by Skanska
Skanska AB () is a multinational construction and development company based in Sweden. Skanska is the fifth-largest construction company in the world according to ''Construction Global'' magazine. Notable Skanska projects include renovation of t ...
; construction started in 2001.
The building has become a recognisable landmark of London, and it is one of the city's most widely recognised examples of contemporary architecture. It won the 2003 Emporis Skyscraper Award
The Emporis Skyscraper Award was an award for architectural excellence regarding the design of buildings and their functionality.
The award was presented annually by Emporis, a real estate data mining company with headquarters in Hamburg, Germany ...
.
Site and early plans
The building stands on the site of the former Baltic Exchange
The Baltic Exchange (incorporated as The Baltic Exchange Limited) is a membership organisation for the maritime industry, and freight market information provider for the trading and settlement of physical and derivative contracts. It was locate ...
( 24–28 St Mary Axe), which was the headquarters of a global marketplace for shipping freight contracts and soft commodities Soft commodities, or softs, are commodities such as coffee, cocoa, sugar, corn, wheat, soybean, fruit and livestock.Patrick Maul, ''Investing in Commodities'', diplom.de, 2011, p8 table c. The term generally refers to commodities that are grown, rat ...
, and the Chamber of Shipping (30–32 St Mary Axe).[ The tower's topmost panoramic dome, known as the "lens", recalls the iconic glass dome that covered part of the ground floor of the Baltic Exchange and much of which is now displayed at the ]National Maritime Museum
The National Maritime Museum (NMM) is a maritime museum in Greenwich, London. It is part of Royal Museums Greenwich, a network of museums in the Maritime Greenwich World Heritage Site. Like other publicly funded national museums in the Unite ...
. ''The Gherkin
A pickled cucumber (commonly known as a pickle in the United States and Canada and a gherkin in Britain, Ireland, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand) is a usually small or miniature cucumber that has been pickled in a brine, vinegar, or ...
'' nickname was applied to the current building at least as early as 1999, referring to the plan's highly unorthodox layout and appearance.
On 10 April 1992, the Provisional IRA
The Irish Republican Army (IRA; ), also known as the Provisional Irish Republican Army, and informally as the Provos, was an Irish republicanism, Irish republican paramilitary organisation that sought to end British rule in Northern Ireland, fa ...
detonated a bomb close to the Baltic Exchange, causing extensive damage to the historic building and neighbouring structures. The United Kingdom government's statutory adviser on the historic environment, English Heritage
English Heritage (officially the English Heritage Trust) is a charity that manages over 400 historic monuments, buildings and places. These include prehistoric sites, medieval castles, Roman forts and country houses.
The charity states that i ...
, and the City of London
The City of London is a city, ceremonial county and local government district that contains the historic centre and constitutes, alongside Canary Wharf, the primary central business district (CBD) of London. It constituted most of London f ...
's governing body, the City of London Corporation
The City of London Corporation, officially and legally the Mayor and Commonalty and Citizens of the City of London, is the municipal governing body of the City of London, the historic centre of London and the location of much of the United King ...
, were keen that any redevelopment must restore the Baltic Exchange's old façade onto St Mary Axe. The Exchange Hall was a celebrated fixture of the shipping market.
English Heritage then discovered that the damage was far more severe than initially thought, and they stopped insisting on full restoration, albeit over the objections of architectural conservationists. The Baltic Exchange and the Chamber of Shipping sold the land to Trafalgar House in 1995. Most of the remaining structures on the Baltic Exchange site were then carefully dismantled, and the interior of Exchange Hall and the façade were preserved, hoping for a reconstruction of the building in the future.[ The salvaged material was eventually sold for £800,000 and moved to ]Tallinn
Tallinn () is the most populous and capital city of Estonia. Situated on a bay in north Estonia, on the shore of the Gulf of Finland of the Baltic Sea, Tallinn has a population of 437,811 (as of 2022) and administratively lies in the Harju '' ...
, Estonia, where it awaits reconstruction as the centrepiece of the city's commercial sector.
In 1996, Trafalgar House submitted plans for the London Millennium Tower
The London Millennium Tower was one of several ideas for the site of the former Baltic Exchange at 30 St Mary Axe, City of London that had been destroyed beyond repair by a Provisional IRA bomb blast.
Designed by Foster & Partners, for then ...
, a building with more than of office space, apartments, shops, restaurants and gardens. This plan was dropped after objections that it was totally out-of-scale in the City of London, and anticipated disruption to flight paths for both London City and London Heathrow
Heathrow Airport (), called ''London Airport'' until 1966 and now known as London Heathrow , is a major international airport in London, England. It is the largest of the six international airports in the London airport system (the others bei ...
airports; the revised plan for a lower tower was accepted.
Planning process
John Prescott
John Leslie Prescott, Baron Prescott (born 31 May 1938) is a British politician who served as Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1997 to 2007 and as First Secretary of State from 2001 to 2007. A member of the Labour Party, he w ...
, the Deputy Prime Minister
A deputy prime minister or vice prime minister is, in some countries, a government minister who can take the position of acting prime minister when the prime minister is temporarily absent. The position is often likened to that of a vice president ...
, granted planning permission
Planning permission or developmental approval refers to the approval needed for construction or expansion (including significant renovation), and sometimes for demolition, in some jurisdictions. It is usually given in the form of a building per ...
on 23 August 2000 to construct a building on the site, which would be much larger than the old Exchange.[ The site needed development, was not on any of the "sight lines" (planning guidance requires that new buildings do not obstruct or detract from the view of St Paul's Cathedral dome when viewed from a number of locations around London), and had housed the Baltic Exchange.
The plan for the site was to reconstruct the Baltic Exchange. GMW Architects proposed a new rectangular building surrounding a restored exchange: it would have the type of large ]floor plan
In architecture and building engineering, a floor plan is a technical drawing to scale, showing a view from above, of the relationships between rooms, spaces, traffic patterns, and other physical features at one level of a structure.
Dimensio ...
that banks liked. Eventually, the planners realised that the exchange was not recoverable, forcing them to relax their building constraints; they hinted that an "architecturally significant" building might obtain a favourable reception from City authorities. This gave the architect a free hand in the design. The building was designed according to the client's needs, rather than for the needs of a large, capital-efficient, money-making building.
The new building's low-level plan satisfied the planning authority's desire to maintain London's traditional streetscape, with its narrow streets. The massing
Massing is a term in architecture which refers to the perception of the general shape and form as well as size of a building.
Massing in architectural theory
Massing refers to the structure in three dimensions (form), not just its outline from ...
of the tower was not too imposing. Like Barclays' former city headquarters in Lombard Street, the idea was that the passer-by in neighbouring streets would be nearly oblivious to the tower's existence until directly underneath it.
Design and construction
The building was constructed by Skanska
Skanska AB () is a multinational construction and development company based in Sweden. Skanska is the fifth-largest construction company in the world according to ''Construction Global'' magazine. Notable Skanska projects include renovation of t ...
, completed in December 2003 and opened on 28 April 2004.[ The primary occupant of the building is ]Swiss Re
Swiss Reinsurance Company Ltd,
Swiss Re. Retrieved on 18 January 2011. "Swiss Reinsurance Company Ltd ("Swiss Re") ...
, a global reinsurance company, which had the building commissioned as the head office for its UK operation. The tower is thus sometimes known as the Swiss Re Building, although this name has never been official and was never in popular usage anyway, unlike the Gherkin moniker.
The building uses energy-saving methods which allow it to use only half the power that a similar tower would typically consume.[ Gaps in each floor create six shafts that serve as a natural ventilation system for the entire building, even though required firebreaks on every sixth floor interrupt the "chimney". The shafts create a giant ]double glazing
Insulating glass (IG) consists of two or more glass window panes separated by a space to reduce heat transfer across a part of the building envelope. A window with insulating glass is commonly known as double glazing or a double-paned windo ...
effect; air is sandwiched between two layers of glazing and insulates the office space inside.[
Architects promote double glazing in residential houses, which avoids the inefficient ]convection
Convection is single or multiphase fluid flow that occurs spontaneously due to the combined effects of material property heterogeneity and body forces on a fluid, most commonly density and gravity (see buoyancy). When the cause of the conve ...
of heat across the relatively narrow gap between the panes, but the tower exploits this effect. The shafts pull warm air out of the building during the summer and warm the building in the winter using passive solar heating
In passive solar building design, windows, walls, and floors are made to collect, store, reflect, and distribute solar energy, in the form of heat in the winter and reject solar heat in the summer. This is called passive solar design because, unl ...
. The shafts also allow sunlight to pass through the building, making the work environment more pleasing, and keeping the lighting costs down.
The primary methods for controlling wind-excited sways are to increase the stiffness, or increase damping with tuned/active mass dampers. To a design by Arup, its fully triangulated perimeter structure makes the building rigid enough without any extra reinforcements. Despite its overall curved glass shape, there is only one piece of curved glass on the building, the lens-shaped cap at the apex.[
On the building's top level (the 40th floor), there is a bar for tenants and their guests, with a panoramic view of London. A restaurant operates on the 39th floor, and private dining rooms on the 38th.][ Most buildings have extensive ]lift
Lift or LIFT may refer to:
Physical devices
* Elevator, or lift, a device used for raising and lowering people or goods
** Paternoster lift, a type of lift using a continuous chain of cars which do not stop
** Patient lift, or Hoyer lift, mobil ...
equipment on the roof of the building, but this was not possible for the Gherkin, since a bar had been planned for the 40th floor. The architects dealt with this by having the main lift only reach the 34th floor, with a separate push-from-below lift to the 39th floor. There is a marble stairwell and a disabled persons' lift, which leads the visitor up to the bar in the dome.
The building is visible over long distances: From the north, for instance, it can be seen from the M11 motorway, some away,[ while to the west it can be seen from the statue of George III in ]Windsor Great Park
Windsor Great Park is a Royal Park of , including a deer park, to the south of the town of Windsor on the border of Berkshire and Surrey in England. It is adjacent to the private Home Park, which is nearer the castle. The park was, for man ...
.
After completion
In April 2005, a glass panel two thirds up the tower fell to the plaza beneath. The plaza was sealed off, but the building remained open. A temporary covered walkway, extending across the plaza to the building's reception, was erected to protect visitors. Engineers examined the other 744 glass panels on the building. The cost of repair was covered by main contractor Skanska and curtain-wall supplier Schmidlin (now called Schmidlin-TSK AG). The open-floor ventilation system did not operate as designed due to tenants adding glass partitions to increase security.
Since its completion, the building has won a number of awards for architecture. In October 2004, the architect was awarded the 2004 Stirling Prize
The Royal Institute of British Architects Stirling Prize is a British prize for excellence in architecture. It is named after the architect James Stirling, organised and awarded annually by the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA). The S ...
. For the first time in the prize's history, the judges were unanimous. In December 2005, a survey of the world's largest firms of architects published in ''2006 BD World Architecture 200'' voted the tower as the most admired new building in the world. However, Ken Shuttleworth, who worked for Foster + Partners on the design of the building, said in 2011 that he believed the style was now out-moded: "I was looking at the glass all around and hought 'Why on earth did we do that?' Now we would do things differently". The building appeared in recent films such as '' Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince'', ''A Good Year
''A Good Year'' is a 2006 romantic comedy film directed and produced by Ridley Scott. The film stars Russell Crowe, Marion Cotillard, Didier Bourdon, Abbie Cornish, Tom Hollander, Freddie Highmore and Albert Finney. The film is loosely based ...
'', ''Basic Instinct 2
''Basic Instinct 2'' (also known as ''Basic Instinct 2: Risk Addiction'') is a 2006 erotic thriller film and the sequel to 1992's '' Basic Instinct''. The film was directed by Michael Caton-Jones and produced by Mario Kassar, Joel B. Michaels ...
'', and ''Match Point
''Match Point'' is a 2005 psychological thriller film written and directed by Woody Allen and starring Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Scarlett Johansson, Emily Mortimer, Matthew Goode, Brian Cox, and Penelope Wilton. In the film, Rhys Meyers' charac ...
'' and, rechristened the ''Spirit of London'', became the spaceship centrepiece of Keith Mansfield's 2008 novel '' Johnny Mackintosh and the Spirit of London''.
In September 2006, the building was put up for sale with a price tag of £600 million. Potential buyers included British Land
The British Land Company plc is one of the largest property development and investment companies in the United Kingdom. The firm became a real estate investment trust when REITs were introduced in the UK in January 2007. It is headquartered in ...
, Land Securities
Land Securities Group plc is the largest commercial property development and investment company in the United Kingdom. The firm became a real estate investment trust (REIT) when REITs were introduced in the United Kingdom in January 2007. It is ...
, Prudential, ING
Ing, ING or ing may refer to:
Art and media
* '' ...ing'', a 2003 Korean film
* i.n.g, a Taiwanese girl group
* The Ing, a race of dark creatures in the 2004 video game '' Metroid Prime 2: Echoes''
* "Ing", the first song on The Roches' 1992 ...
, and the Abu Dhabi royal family. On 21 February 2007, IVG Immobilien
IVG Immobilien (formerly known as IndustrieVerwaltungsGesellschaft mbH) is a German real estate company headquartered in Bonn, Germany. It is a leading commercial property owner in Germany and other European countries.
Activities
The core busi ...
AG and UK investment firm Evans Randall completed their joint purchase of the building for £630 million, making it Britain's most expensive office building. Swiss Re made a gain of more than £300 million from the sale. The new owners are seeking compensation from four of their former managers on the deal, in which about £620 million was paid for a building with a build cost of about £200 million, giving the previous owners a clear £300 million profit.
Since February 2010, Sky News has broadcast its flagship business programme, '' Jeff Randall Live'', from a studio in the building. The top two floors of the tower have been available since at least 2015 for private hire for events.
Deloitte
Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited (), commonly referred to as Deloitte, is an international professional services network headquartered in London, England. Deloitte is the largest professional services network by revenue and number of professio ...
announced in April 2014 that the building was again being put up for sale, with an expected price of £550 million. The current owners could not afford to make loan repayments, citing differences in the value of the multi-currency loan and the British pound, high interest rates and general financing structure. In November 2014, the Gherkin was purchased for £700 million by the Safra Group
The J. Safra Group is an international network of companies controlled by the Safra family, comprising banking and financial institutions and industrial operations. It is present in the United States, Europe, the Middle East, Latin America, ...
, controlled by the Brazilian billionaire Joseph Safra
Joseph Safra ( ar, يوسف صفرا; 1 September 1938 – 10 December 2020) was a Swiss-based Lebanese Brazilian banker and billionaire businessman, who ran the Brazilian banking and investment empire, Safra Group.
Joseph Safra was the ch ...
.
See also
* Landmarks of London
* Diagrid
A diagrid (a portmanteau of diagonal grid) is a Framing (construction), framework of diagonally intersecting metal, concrete, or wooden Beam (structure), beams that is used in the construction of buildings and roofs. It requires less struct ...
* List of tallest buildings and structures in London
St Paul's Cathedral, built in 1710, was the tallest building in London at until it was overtaken in 1963 by the Millbank Tower at , which in turn was overtaken by the BT Tower which topped out at tall in 1964. In the 1960s and 1970s several ...
* Mathematics and architecture
* Phallic architecture
Phallic architecture consciously or unconsciously creates a symbolic representation of the human penis. Buildings intentionally or unintentionally resembling the human penis are a source of amusement to locals and tourists in various places around ...
, a list of similarly shaped buildings that includes 30 St Mary Axe
References
External links
*
Norman Foster's site about the project
{{Authority control
Skyscrapers in the City of London
Office buildings completed in 2003
High-tech architecture
Lattice shell structures
Foster and Partners buildings
Ove Arup buildings and structures
Neo-futurism architecture
2003 in London
Skyscraper office buildings in London