Month: June 2011

The Curve Of The Gherkin

The Gherkin Building in St. Mary Axe, London
The Gherkin Building in St. Mary Axe, London

This is a follow-up to this article on photographing London in which I mentioned the Gherkin building in the financial district in London.

I walked around the area, looking for a viewpoint from which I could show the way that the building curves inwards at the bottom. In other words, it really is a gherkin shape narrowing at each end.

You can see what I mean in these two shots. You can also get an idea of the size of the building, which is 590 feet (180m) tall.

Open Space And Criss-Crossed Girders
The building is covered in glass windows, but not all the way down to the ground. At ground level you see the criss-cross of the supporting girders with the lowest windows and doors set back behind them.

The girders make a kind of porch all around the building.

There is also some open space around the building and only a token fence between it and the pavement, so when you get close to the Gherkin you see this ‘looming yet somehow elegant’ building sitting there on its network of crossed girders.

I think that makes for a much more successful design than would have been the case if the windows had continued to encase the structure right to ground level. Then I think the building would have had no ‘bottom’. It would have looked more like it was rising out of the ground with part hidden below – perhaps like a ballistic missile being launched from its underground silo.

The Gherkin Showing The Curve Of The Building
The Gherkin Showing The Lower Curve Of The Building

The Church Of St. Helen’s
Meanwhile, just a few tens of yards from the gherkin there is the Church of St. Helen’s dating back to 1633. It was damaged by the same IRA bomb that blew out the front of the Baltic Exchange building.

As I mentioned in my last article, following the explosion the Baltic Exchange was demolished because it was considered too expensive to repair and the Gherkin building now stands on the site of the Exchange.

Luckily, the church was repaired rather than being torn down.

Great St. Helens Church In London
Great St. Helens Church In London

It is not hard to imagine this church set in a maze of narrow, winding streets. Those streets have gone, and the rebuilding that is happening in the area now is on a massive scale.

New Steel Skeletons
Just across the street from the church there are the steel skeletons of new buildings that growing over and through the streets. Looking at the steelwork, it is not hard to think of some robot world where the buildings build themselves and march ever onward.

Great St. Helens Church In London - Close Up
Great St. Helens Church In London - Close Up