Millennium Dome

The Blair government commissioned the Richard Rogers Partnership in 1996 to house the Millennium Experience, a year-long exhibition marking the year 2000 on a stretch of former gasworks land at Greenwich that badly needed a use. Engineered with Buro Happold, the dome is really a tent: twelve 100-metre steel masts, arranged in a ring and raked outward, carry a web of tensioned steel cables that in turn support a lightweight fabric roof of seventy-two PTFE-coated fibreglass panels, 365 metres across (a metre for every day of the year) and rising 52 metres at the centre (a metre for every week). Built in just fifteen months for £43 million, the shell itself came in on budget and ahead of schedule; the exhibition it covered did not, running to £789 million of largely lottery money against forecasts the visitor numbers never matched, and the resulting political embarrassment briefly cost two cabinet careers. The dome stood empty for years afterward until a 2005–2007 conversion turned it into The O2, an indoor arena, and it now hosts more concerts than any other venue of its kind in the world.