The View from The Shard

Architect Renzo Piano originally sketched the design for this building on a restaurant napkin during a lunch meeting in the year nineteen ninety-eight. He drew inspiration for its jagged, tapering form from the spires of London churches and the masts of tall ships seen in historic paintings of the River Thames. The structure was conceived as a vertical city, designed to pack offices, a hotel, residences, and public spaces into a single, needle-like footprint that rises over one thousand feet above the capital.