The Giants’ Toy Box

For the architecture-aficionado the city of London is like a candy store. In the last 15 years a bunch of iconic, weird, cool and quite unique buildings have been built here. We have been travelling to a few cities, including Hong Kong and New York, but we still find London is really quite unique when it comes to tall buildings. Maybe it has something to do with when the majority of them had been built and we believe other ‘young’ cities in this respect, like Singapore of Dubai, might be similar. To us it’s as if a giant simply dumped his building blocks in a huge pile. The result is that in a small place we have lots of rather fancy building blocks, each of them quite exciting…. but as a whole it still looks a little bit random.

We don’t really think that in the skyscraper boom in Now York, when the Chrysler Building and Empire State Building were constructed there was much concern about how one would look next to the other and who they would create a harmonious picture. But due to the construction method and material limitations at that time, it all looked rather nice together.

If you fast forward to today, there are a million more possibilities and the possibilities of using steel and glass have multiplied. So when you just concentrate on how you want your skyscraper to look like, chances are it will compete with its surroundings sometimes in not the most pretty way. Well, maybe it’s just us, because we like harmony.

But, having said this, we always enjoyed a stroll though the city and find new and interesting angles, new reflections and unusual views. And the city never disappoints!