The University of Sydney

• ENGG 3853

  Course name

ENGG 3853 Assignment1 The Shard Building Yuting Guo 450010712 Words count: 2878 Assignment 1 Yuting Guo 450010712 2 / 16 1.0 Introduction The London Bridge Tower, also commonly known as “The Shard”, is the tallest vertical and multi-functional city building in UK as well as in European Union, which is located beside the London Bridge station with the wonderful views of south Thames River  The Shard is 309.6 metres tall with 95 levels (the highest living level is up to 72), 36 lifts which the speed is 6m/s, 11000 glass panels shielded outside building surface, and 360 degree of skyline view on levels 68 to 72 raised from ground (the-shard, a-vertical-city, 2018). The well-known architect Renzo Piano is the major designer of the Shard Building which is contracted under the owner Irvine Sellar (the-shard, the vison, 2018). Irvine Sellar is an aggressive and creative person who has great ideas and clear objectives of creating an assorted or diversified center which contains workplaces, condos, restaurants, star-rated hotel and open viewing gallery(ibid.). Irvine aimed to rebuild the Southwark Tower into multi-zone form which was crossed the one of the dominant transport center in London that could provide everyone with great experience as well as impressive sights in 1999(ibid.). At first, Renzo Piano was not willing to accept Irvine’s thought of building such architecture during the lunch invitation in Berlin(ibid.). However, after quick imagining of combining the subways and beautiful sights of The Thames, Renzo tried to sketch and the sketch was similar to nowadays “The Shard”(ibid.). In 2000, the two of the greatest creators finally made the agreement to build “The Shard” (ibid). Once the project started, the huge amount of difficulties and challenges crashed over the years like the long initial planning duration o