Unique Building Design Is
More Vlasic Than Classic

At just 590 feet and 40 stories, the new skyscraper officially known as 30 St. Mary Axe is less than half the height of the world's 10 tallest buildings, and not even the tallest building in London. But it draws instant attention from either side of the Thames because of its unique shape, which has been variously compared to a cigar, a rocket, a bullet, a penis, a lipstick, a Zeppelin, a lava lamp, a bandaged finger, and -- most frequently -- a gherkin. Its architect, Norman Foster of Foster and Partners, prefers the metaphor of a pine cone or pineapple, since they do more justice to the natural evolution of the building's round-section, bulging-center, dome-topped shape.

The building, which opened in December 2003, is the most provocative high-rise erected in London since Richard Rogers's intricate, high-tech, stainless-steel-clad Lloyd's Building of 1986, which is located two corners away. To my eye, it is the most ingenious and elegant new skyscraper built anywhere in the world for at least 30 years. Mr. Foster's best-known designs, which include the HSBC bank headquarters in Hong Kong, the new Reichstag dome in Berlin, and the Commerzbank in Frankfurt (the tallest building in Europe), combine the look-at-me configurations that most celebrity architects give their buildings nowadays with a profound, persuasive sense that these shapes are the result of the most rigorous application of hard logic (and a lot of computer time) to complex human and structural problems.

More Vlasic than classic in design, London's 30 St. Mary Axe is nonetheless stunning.

One can try to experience 30 St. Mary Axe in purely aesthetic terms, in which I think it succeeds very well. Some Londoners, including the Prince of Wales, despise it for desecrating the ancient City of London; but the quaint character of the City was pretty well desecrated decades ago by World War II bombing and uninspired postwar rebuilding. I admit the round, tapering/bulging/tapering shape is a bit giddy-looking for a building whose owner and chief tenant is Swiss Re, a sober and respectable Zurich-based reinsurance company. But the sparkling glass surfaces outside (made of 5,500 triangular windows, many of which open) and calm gray walls inside are ultrachic and ultrasleek. The very readable harlequin-patterned external decoration (representing both structural members and window edges), interrupted for barber-pole stripes of spiraling dark glass, seems at first the result of purely stylistic decisions, like those of a fashionable furniture designer.

And the tenants-only restaurant and bar on the uppermost floors -- with their muted grisaille tones, baroque silver staircase surrounding a cylindrical glass elevator, and 360-degree views of all London -- are almost too perfect to believe.

But what elevates this experience into a transcendent sense of intellectual satisfaction is the realization that all of these exquisitely integrated features (well, perhaps not the icily elegant stairway and elevator at the top) are even more the result of tough, ingenious engineering and environmental solutions than the whims of clever, tasteful artists.

The building is round in floor plan (every floor is a different size) to reduce the high winds generated at street level by tall rectangular buildings and minimize its apparent size: You cannot see the top from the bottom, and it tends to slip between surrounding buildings when seen from afar. The tapered lower half allowed the architect to open up a paved plaza in one of the densest parts of London; the rounded top softens its impact on the skyline. The white (diagonal) and midnight blue (horizontal) steel boxes that clad the outside structural members are ever so slightly dented, to accommodate the gradual curve of the glass. Except for one big contact lens on the very top, all the windows are in fact flat. The apparent curvature is created, Buckminster Fuller-fashion, by the flawless assemblage of them all. Like Frank Gehry's expressionistic blobs, 30 St. Mary Axe could never have been created precomputer.

On each of the office levels (floors 2-34), six pie-shaped wedges have been cut out from the plan, leaving the floor in the shape of a fat asterisk, with elevators and other service facilities at the center. These six open cuts allow natural daylight to penetrate far back toward the elevator core, draw fresh air into and through the building, and add many linear feet of desirable window-facing office space. On the inside, one side of each is left as an open balcony, which can be used as an area for employees to socialize or simply gaze into several floors above and below. Each of these open spaces has been rotated five degrees clockwise from that on the floor below, and glazed with smoked, single-pane, windows that can open -- which accounts for the dark, spiraling stripes one sees from the outside, and many dazzling visual experiences within.

Swiss Re is seriously concerned about the possible financial costs to its clients of such things as global warming and was determined to make its London headquarters a model of "green," energy-efficient design -- in part by choosing an architect who shares its concerns. Many examples of this were pointed out on my tour, including computerized external "weather stations" that automatically monitor wind, sunlight and heat, and open or close windows and inter-pane blinds accordingly. Genuine fresh air from outside can be guided about and used to reduce considerably the need for mechanical air conditioning. There are no spaces for cars in the basement (several subway stations are near), but there are racks for bicycles and showers for cyclists.

This unique project was allowed to go forward only after several years of debate over the fate of the less-than-inspired Edwardian building it replaced, which had been damaged by an IRA bomb in 1992. The short London street on which it sits was named for a long-lost church that supposedly contained the very ax by which thousands of fifth-century virgins were slaughtered by Attila and his Huns. Now the wise men and women of Zurich have blessed this narrow old lane in London's historic financial center with a sparkling, sensuous, profoundly sensible tower. Foster and Partners' achievement sets an almost impossibly high standard for the many neighboring London skyscrapers now emerging on computer monitors.

Email your comments to rjeditor@dowjones.com.