Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Field Trip to London Part 3

4 Feb: We started the day at the office of Gensler Architects in Aldgate. Lukazs Platkowski gave his usual excellent lecture on Tall buildings, but as always using completely new case studies to illustrate his advice on TB design. Gensler have just won a competition in Riyadh with his design, and he showed the evolution of the design from a single tower to variations on twin tower or finally a split tower - one with a deep vertical slit between two cores to give good daylight and ventilation.
After the lecture we had a long walkabout, starting down Minories, to Tower of London (noting the Tower Hill office building by RSH), on to Tower Bridge, and into the GLA building - which we entered, as high as the public can go. We walked on past Hays Galleria and the Cotton Exchange to have a look at the building site of the London Bridge tower (the Shard). We took the Tube to Canary Wharf and had an hour's walkabout there. Caught the DLR to Canning Town station for a good look at our site. Then we returned to East India Dock station on the DLR and had a walk along the Thames (seeing this millennium beacon at E India Dock), and spend the rest of the time on the Trinity site - some people went for a walk on the small eco-park to the west of our site. The bus home picked us up from Orchard Place, for a safe ride home.

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