The Shard

Renzo Piano sketched the first concept for this building on the back of a napkin at a Berlin restaurant. He drew a spire inspired by the church steeples of London and the masts of tall ships in Canaletto's paintings of the Thames — a shard of glass rising from the riverbank like something between a cathedral and an iceberg. The name stuck.

At 310 metres, The Shard is the tallest building in Western Europe. It has 95 storeys with 72 habitable floors, and its eight sloping glass facades fragment the sky in different ways depending on the weather and the time of day. The building contains offices, three restaurants, the five-star Shangri-La hotel (occupying floors 34 to 52), ten private apartments, and The View from The Shard on floor 72, which at 244 metres is the highest public viewing platform in the UK.

Construction began in March 2009 and the building was topped out on 30 March 2012, but the story of getting it built is almost as interesting as the building itself. Piano initially envisioned it as a "vertical city" — a place where people live, work, eat, and sleep without ever touching the ground. London Bridge station, directly below, makes it one of the most connected skyscrapers in the world.

The building uses 11,000 glass panels — enough to cover eight football pitches — and no two panels are quite the same shape. At the top, the glass facades don't quite meet, leaving an open crown that lets the wind pass through rather than pushing against a solid surface. It's a practical solution that gives the building its distinctive unfinished look, as though it's still reaching upward.