I wrote this whimsy in a fugue state one evening in October after seeing this Tweet. Thank you Paul for the inspiration.
https://twitter.com/Paauul/status/922169183491821568
To say that the world was shocked when the Scottish Parliament building was suddenly transported 1000 miles into the centre of Barcelona, would be something of an understatement.
No similar, verifiable phenomenon had ever before occurred in human history. The field of physics was thrown into disarray, when not one scientist could offer an explanation for why a building with a footprint of some four acres should suddenly, and without warning, disappear from its site beneath the cragged, volcanic mountain of Arthur’s Seat, and reappear on the site of the Mercat Santa Caterina. Continue reading “El Miracle de Miralles”
St George and the Shard
I am very pleased with this image I took, of St George the Martyr’s church, juxtaposed with The Shard at London Bridge.
That is all. Carry on with whatever it was you were doing.
The Birth of the Shard
If you take a stroll down Farringdon Road, from Exmouth Market towards Clerkenwell Green, you will come upon a magnificent sight-line into the City of London. It is not until you reach the Betsey Trotwood and the Free Word Centre that St Paul’s Cathedral emerges on the skyline, but from further up the road, a new landmark is emerging – Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers’ Shard of Glass, currently under construction.
Since I work at the Free Word Centre, I regularly happen across this view. I often take a quick snap with the camera on my phone. Below is an example that has been filtered through Instagr.am.
A better attempt with an SLR and telephoto lense is on Flickr:
I have found that the damp and foggy days when the building emerges from midst are when the Shard looks most interesting. The giant looms on the horizon, and one’s sense of scale is confused and compressed, which reminds me of the famous photograph by the Liverpudlian photographer E. Chambré Hardman, ‘The Birth of the Ark Royal’, taken in 1950.
See also the weathered early photographs of Tower Bridge and the Eiffel Tower under construction. Watching The Shard rise, I have a strong sense of being embedded in history. I know that it will become a symbol of London, like Gherkin and Millenium Wheel, or the pointy Transamerica Pyramid in San Fransisco. Watching it grow makes me feel like I am sat inside an iconic, historical image.
