London’s skyline is now a “jarring profusion of odd skyscrapers with funny names”, thanks to planning officials too easily dazzled by star architects, according to a lament for the capital.
“The world’s most famous architects have used London as a playground, with cacophonous results,” the New York Times’s columnist Peter Coy told his readers, citing research suggesting that the British planning process allows for larger and more extravagant projects by “trophy architects”.
He described the skyscraper known as the Walkie Talkie as “a bulbous cartoon of a building”. The edifice, called The Fenchurch Building, won Building Design magazine’s “Carbuncle Cup” in 2015. It was blamed for reflecting the sun’s rays into a beam of light and heat so intense that it melted a Jaguar parked
