The Shard

Renzo Piano's first sketch for the site, reportedly drawn on a restaurant napkin during a 2000 lunch with the developer Irvine Sellar, showed a spire rising out of the railway tracks at London Bridge station like a shard of glass — the nickname stuck before the tower had a name. Construction began in 2009 on the site of the demolished 1970s Southwark Towers, and the building topped out at 309.6 metres in 2012, opening the following year as the tallest building in the United Kingdom and, briefly, the European Union. Eight sloping glass facets rise the full height of the tower without ever quite meeting at a single point, an intentionally 'unfinished' apex left open to the sky; inside, the tower stacks offices, a hotel, apartments and, above the 68th floor, a public viewing gallery reached by Europe's fastest lifts. The glass skin is double-glazed with a ventilated cavity to manage solar gain, an early example of the strategy at this scale.