Drapers Gardens redevelopment | City of London | 74m | 16 fl

[Zenith]

I dont know what the complaining is about. The new building is shorter ?? so what ??? its still 76 m and far bigger and more grand. The fact it steps back is also a fantastic attribute.

[Noostairz]

great news. drapers gardens and 20 fenchurch street are two of the dreariest blots on the skyline.

with swiss re around and others to come it's like the skyline's shaping up to be a decent looking lady, but with drapers and fenchurch around it's always going to be a decent looking lady with an unappealing edge, like bad teeth. no one likes bad teeth, not even on a looker.

[timo]

Originally Posted by wjfox2002

What's "disgraceful" about it?

I think it's one of the best midrises in the City.

it is bland and boring and quite frankly the city is better without this type of building

especially when there is a much nicer midrise replacing it

[Starscraper]

From the time it takes to knock this down could we estimate how long it would take to demolish the building LBT will stand on?

In some ways I will miss this building, I like its shape and the greenish glass in it.

[Newcastle Guy]

Timo I ACTUALLY agree with you... partly.

I didnt REALLY mind the current Drapers Gardens building, but it could not stay like that in its current state. I think the replacement is excellent

[timo]

i am always right

you will learn this over time

[Newcastle Guy]

I admited you were right once dont push your luck

[timo]

yes maybe that was pushing my luck a little bit

the proof will be in the pisshole though as they say

aye

[Jack Rabbit Slim]

I actually quite like the look of this new Drapers gardens building. It has a classical look to it, at the same time looking shiney new and modern, and it isn't a) a dull box or b) another crazy curly wurly wanna-be iconic building. very pleased with it in fact, and the height reduction from the original doesn't botehr me at all, as it shoukd help improve the skyline and focus more attension on the bigger skysrapers.

As for the building being demolished....well, it isn't a gastly awful building, and when you actually take an in depth look at it, it's a decent enough midrise/skyscraper....as skyscrapers go anyway, but it looks a little outdated, and the concrete top really spoils it for me.

[Tubeman]

A couple of pics of the existing building, for posterity. Not bad!

As I said, I am glad the view of St Paul's from Waterloo Bridge will be drastically improved, but I still think its a shame this building is being demolished when there's plenty I'd sooner see go.

Front



Side



Angle

[wjfox]

From the Monument:

[potto]

I think the trouble with the City midrises, particularly the Draper Gardens end is that they all had the same height and it just looked really really bad when viewing the skyline

[wjfox]

EH tried to have this building listed according to skyscrapernews!

[Madman]

I am not surprised when you consider the Trellick Tower and Centrepoint already are. From a distance this tower looks awful but close up (bar the podium) it wasnt that bad at all.

[Tubeman]

Originally Posted by wjfox2002

EH tried to have this building listed according to skyscrapernews!

Jesus! You couldn't make it up!!!

I thought the whole idea of demolishing DG was as a form of appeasement to EH et al... removing the visually damaging western edge to the City cluster in return for muted support of taller buildings further east?

[Tubeman]

Originally Posted by potto

I think the trouble with the City midrises, particularly the Draper Gardens end is that they all had the same height and it just looked really really bad when viewing the skyline

I can't even begin to imagine how lame the City 'cluster' looked pre-Natwest Tower... a drab wall of 100m-tall towers with St Helens as a 'pinnacle' by a few yards. Anyone got any shots? Come to think of it I've never seen any construction photos of the Natwest Tower or any other of London's towers pre-Canary Wharf for that matter.

I'm right in thinking that Angel Court and the Natwest Tower were both u/c at the same time right?

That means that the 'skyline' consisted of Drapers, Stock Exchange, Limebank, 20 Fenchurch St and St Helens...

[wjfox]

Originally Posted by Tubeman

I can't even begin to imagine how lame the City 'cluster' looked pre-Natwest Tower... a drab wall of 100m-tall towers with St Helens as a 'pinnacle' by a few yards. Anyone got any shots? Come to think of it I've never seen any construction photos of the Natwest Tower or any other of London's towers pre-Canary Wharf for that matter.

I'm right in thinking that Angel Court and the Natwest Tower were both u/c at the same time right?

That means that the 'skyline' consisted of Drapers, Stock Exchange, Limebank, 20 Fenchurch St and St Helens...

http://www.skyscrapernews.com/images...London+in+1974

[wjfox]

A few years later -






More pics of NatWest under construction can be found here:
http://www.skyscrapercity.com/showthread.php?t=341508

[Jack Rabbit Slim]

Originally Posted by wjfox2002

From the Monument:

I hink I am right in saying that those 3 md rise skyscrapers in the picure there are all being developed on. The bworn one on the left (can't remember the name) is getting a height increase and a re-cladding; the middle one is obviously the focus of this thread and is getting demolished to be replaced with the 76m new Drapers Gardens; and the one on the right-the old stock exchange building-is verrrrrry slowly getting a much much needed reclad. I think that's all correct...?

I know we all say this this all the time, but can you actually imagine how this skyline is gonna look in about 6 years, with these and a few other midrises being built or developed, then Heron, Leadenhall and DIFA clustering around Swiss Re and T42...with 20 fenchurch st....and LBT not too far away and St Pauls stadning there totally cleaned and refurbished!!!!

[jimbo]

hmmm, partially agree - but I quite like it, especially those wonderful photos tubeman posted. Feel abit sorry for Richard Seifert - his designs were concrete and rather brutal, but certainly unique in their time.

He died in 2001 aged 90, and I'm sure he'd be rather upset to see some of his creations biting the dust.

This is his obituary from the Guardian:

Workaholic architect whose tall towers changed the urban skyline of Britain and Europe

Martin Pawley
Monday October 29, 2001
The Guardian


Centre Point: the proud product of a number of architects

The death, at the age of 90, of the architect Richard Seifert, the designer of Centre Point and the Natwest Tower - still the tallest building in the City of London - marks the end of one of the great buccaneering eras of office building in Britain.
Though a later arrival on the scene than some of his competitors, through serendipitous connections and hard work Seifert soon became an awe-inspiring figure in the world of commercial development. From the early 1960s until his retirement in the 1980s, his reputation for speed and mastery of planning law made him the doyen of commercial architects, not merely in London but also in provincial cities, and later in mainland Europe as well.


A designer of eclectic talents, he produced work that gradually evolved from neo-classic orthodoxy to an expressionistic modernism, driven by a powerful ambition that kept him beyond the pale, as far as the stylistic arbiters of the profession were concerned, for much of his professional life. Only in retirement did he begin to be accorded the respect and admiration to which the force and drama of his work entitled him.
Born Reuben (later Robin, though usually called Richard) Seifert into a Swiss-Jewish family that subsequently moved to London, he was one of the 10 children of a cinema manager. He conceived the desire to become an architect at an early age, and, in 1927, won a scholarship to the Bartlett school of architecture in the University of London.

He graduated in 1933 and, after a brief apprenticeship as a trainee surveyor and architectural assistant, set up in practice on his own, drawing up modest, north London speculative housing schemes of traditional appearance for fixed fees. He first attracted professional attention in 1939 when he won second prize in a competition for the design of a façade for the recently established Building Centre in Store Street, off Tottenham Court Road.

During the second world war, Seifert served in India and Burma with the Royal Engineers, attaining the rank of colonel, a soubriquet that followed him into the postwar world as he resumed practice in London. In 1947, he designed a large factory building for Rival Lamps, and, in 1956, an imposing neo-classic building for Woolworths in Marylebone Road.

But it was not until 1960 that his taste for the spectacular emerged in the design of Tolworth House, a 22-storey, reinforced concrete office building on the Kingston bypass that bore traces of the influence of the Brazilian concrete expressionist architect Oscar Niemeyer. The equally expressive circular Space House, off Kingsway, was completed in 1962.

By then, the commission that was to make Seifert notorious was already under way in his offices in Golden Square. A young property developer from the north of England named Harry Hyams had commissioned him to design a high-rise, mixed-use complex - office tower, shops, showroom and apartments - at St Giles Circus, on the junction of Charing Cross Road and Oxford Street. This project, soon christened Centre Point, became the tallest building in London when it was completed in 1963. It was also one of the most daring, with large areas of glass cladding at the lower levels and a unique precast, concrete-framed, fin-shaped tower soaring up 36 storeys to the roof 116 metres above.

The height was Seifert's negotiating achievement, a quid pro quo for Hyams having agreed to make over to the then London County Council - for use as a traffic roundabout - those parts of the site not required to support the buildings. In return, Hyams gained a 150-year lease at a fixed rent on the rest and, more importantly, Seifert was permitted to build to the maximum allowable floor area for the whole site, in this case some 20,000 square metres.

Ingenious it may have been, but for various reasons unconnected with the design, Centre Point was not popular. It remained unlet for 15 years, and was, at various times, invaded by squatters and threatened with compulsory purchase by the local Camden council. The Confederation of British Industry, which finally took it over in 1979, was its first tenant.

As his commercial commissions became larger - he later proposed a 150-storey tower for Liverpool which was not built - Seifert came into conflict with community groups, crusading planners, conservationists and the Royal Fine Art Commission (RFAC). He became convinced that the RFAC, in particular, was actively encouraging local authority planning departments to discourage developers from using his services.

After Centre Point, bureaucratic opposition did begin to delay his work. In the case of his last great structure, the 183-metre Natwest Tower (originally one of two towers, the second of which was never built), a 10-year planning battle took place that helped to ensure the building faced obsolescence almost as soon as it was opened in 1981.

By any standards, the Natwest Tower, built as a new headquarters for the National Westminster Bank, was a tremendous technical and design achievement. Springing from deep pilings underground, like the trunk of a tree, it was, at the time of its construction, the tallest unbraced building in the world. Its 50 office floors, served by double-decker lifts, housed 2,500 office workers in computer-controlled comfort. Outside their windows, a patent automatic screenwasher system worked to keep 2,000 square metres of glass cladding clean.

The only problem with the building was the electronic revolution that was about to sweep through the financial services industry. By the mid-1980s, it was clear that the Natwest tower's office floors were too small and too close together for electronic workstations and all the cabling and air conditioning needed to serve them.

With the onset of the recession of the early 1990s, the wave of redundancies sweeping through the banking sector led to departments being relocated. The building was damaged by IRA bombs in 1992 and 1993, eventually abandoned by the bank, given a hasty facelift by another firm of architects, and sold. It was rechristened as the International Financial Centre, and is now multi-tenanted.

Seifert might have become the architect of the world's tallest building, but his 1980 plans for a diamond-shaped tower in Melbourne came to nothing. His London buildings included the Royal Garden Hotel, Kensington, while his hotel and conference centre at Wembley remains a venue for pop concerts. His hospitals included the Princess Grace, near Euston Road, and he designed high-rise housing in London, Birmingham and Glasgow.

Back in 1946, when he returned from the army, Seifert had bought himself a modest semi-detached house in Mill Hill, north London, which was to remain his home until his death. During his most active years, he enlarged it by the simple expedient of purchasing and demolishing three neighbouring properties to make room for expansion. This enabled him to enjoy a three-acre garden, in which he later built a second house for his daughter Anne and grandchildren. His son John, also a Bartlett graduate, took over his firm in 1984.

During 50 years in practice - an achievement celebrated, in 1984, with an exhibition by the Royal Institute of British Architects - Seifert built more London buildings than Sir Christopher Wren, and undeniably had as great an effect upon the city skyline. His tally in Britain and Europe included more than 500 office bocks, and in the 1970s his practice had 300 employees.

Satisfyingly, he also lived long enough to enjoy the fickleness of architectural fashion. In 1993, his former enemies at the RFAC called for the listing of Centre Point for its "elegance worthy of a Wren steeple".

Seifert is survived by his wife Josephine, whom he married in 1936, Anne, John and his other son, Brian.

· Robin 'Richard' Seifert, architect, born November 25 1910; died October 26 2001

and here's the view from Tower 42 (another of his!)



I agree the base is fairly awful - we have offices on Copthall Avenue, just to the west of the site, and it is fairly desolate and unfriendly, just a shame IMO it couldn't be saved and the ground levels refurbed and opened up. Do we want another modern glass block stepping back - looks no different to the much maligned Spitalfields Market block I think.