Tonight:
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Mayors and towers go together like Richard and Judy, or The X Factor's excruciating twins, John and Edward. They are mutually reinforcing, each one helping the other to look and feel good.
Towers need the oomph of mayoral support to get them though planning, while mayors get to look like men of action if big sticks of building start appearing across the city, even if only in computer-generated form.
Boris is no exception, and three weeks ago he wielded his borough-crushing powers to push through the 240-metre Columbus Tower by Canary Wharf against the wishes of Tower Hamlets.
Now plans for a so-called "Piffle Tower" have leaked out, a potential monument for the 2012 Olympics that is warmly backed by the Mayor.
Such devotion to vertical objects might be expected of the man who once stated his wish to carve "more notches on my phallocratic phallus", but the striking thing about these two towers in the east is the inverse ratio of creative effort to size.
The Columbus Tower, which if built would be visible all over London, has been the subject of minimal aesthetic debate.
The Olympic landmark, far smaller, and at £15 million costing perhaps a thirtieth as much, is the subject of a competition, to be judged by a jury of eminent experts, to which some grandees of contemporary art have reportedly been invited to take part.
The Olympic landmark is a pet project of the Mayor's. It's an attempt to counter the deep, cautious blandness of most of London's Olympic architecture with something iconic and interesting-looking, a thingummybob or wotsit to detain the world's TV cameras during the Games.
Exactly what it will look like depends on the eventual winner - the images so far seen are of only one contender - but a structure between 70 and 150 metres high is envisaged.
The process has been oddly secretive so far but it seems that entries are being judged by figures including numbers one and three on Art Review's international list of the most powerful people in art, namely the Serpentine's Hans Ulrich Obrist and the Tate's Sir Nicholas Serota, and Julia Peyton-Jones, also of the Serpentine. The Mayor, says his office, "is keen to see stunning, ambitious, world-class art".
The landmark is the latest version of the Angel of the North, or Fourth Plinth, or Serpentine pavilion, or the giant white horse proposed for Ebbsfleet, that is to say an ornamental object designed to get people talking, rack up yards of newsprint and hours of TV time, raise the profile of Gateshead/Trafalgar Square/the Serpentine Gallery/Ebbsfleet, and generally add to the gaiety of nations.
At best such works genuinely capture the imagination. At worst, they look like vanity projects for their backers.
It's hard to escape the feeling that the iconic knick-knack is a dwindling currency, a Noughties fad that will soon go the way of hula hoops, but it's also possible that the notion will get its last hurrah in 2012.
With the generous funding of Lakshmi Mittal, the force of Boris, and the wisdom of the eminent advisers, we might yet get something impressive.
But the real question is why such attention is lavished on essentially useless objects while the big buildings where people will live and work, and which really shape London, benefit from considerably lower aspirations.
For I very much doubt that if Serota, Obrist and Peyton-Jones had given as much time to the Columbus Tower, they would have been happy with what is now proposed.
This tower is pure Dubai. It is a shaft, elliptical in plan, with a random diagonal slash up its sides, where one kind of glazing turns to another.
Its top flips upwards, also randomly, into a modish quiff. It sits awkwardly on a low plinth, which its architects, Weintraub Associates, optimistically present as being "sympathetic" to a handsome nearby listed warehouse, built in the Napoleonic wars.
Apart from the plinth's being, like the warehouses, horizontal, it is hard to see any affinity. Wooden cylinders, supposedly inspired by barrels or crow's nests, are stuck in the corners, at odds with the glassy rest of the building.
The tower, which would contain offices, a hotel and flats, is incoherent, both in relation to the parts to the whole, and of the whole to the surroundings, and if built would poke into a classic view across the symmetrical set piece of the Royal Naval College in Greenwich, a view into which the original builders of Canary Wharf were forbidden to intrude.
Design is sometimes said to be subjective, but I believe that most lay people, and most professionals, would not think there was anything very special about the tower.
Yet this, potentially, would be one of London's tallest buildings, and it is taller than any now standing. It should be exceptional. Such projects should be the subject of competitions and mayoral exhortations to achieve the very best.
These, rather than contrivances like the Olympic landmark, should be the monuments of our times. This tower may not, of course, be built any time soon, but its design should still set a standard for whatever happens in the future.
The Columbus Tower is an extreme example of a recurring habit of the past decade. This was supposed to be a time of heightened appreciation of architecture, when dazzling geniuses came to decorate our city.
On a small scale, this happened, and an impressive array of talent created the Serpentine gallery's temporary pavilions. But on the larger scale, notions like "world-class design" proved to be flexible.
Sometimes famous architects would design mediocre buildings, and sometimes mediocre architects would design awful ones. Only rarely would good architects design good buildings.
A task for the next decade is to turn around this mismatch of talent and scale.
So I wish Boris the best of luck with his Piffle Tower, but respectfully request him to apply the same standards to the buildings that really matter.
Reader views (7)
I cannot say I'm greatly excited by a tower that looks like a giant electric pylon, but I do like the idea of an Olympic Tower, helps put this area on the skyline similar to the arch over Wembly. However, the comments on the Columbus Tower are questioned as the tower has long had planning permission, it is in the one area where there is consensus that towers are appropriate in London, and it is with a cluster, including towers of equal height. Why Tower Hamlets felt the tower was now innapropriate when there are more towers at Canary Wharf than ever was hard to understand, including Boris, who in this case made a very sound decision.
- Johnw, Ottawa, Canada
If we put our money where our mouth is, we'd say no to a gigantic 'piffle tower' or any other mammoth steel structure.
The Evening Standard poll on Tuesday 27/10 showed 70% against. Today, Wednesday 28/10 shows a figure of 81% against a giant landmark. Unless Boris's office elves get busy here, there seems to be a resounding no for the idea.
- Andrew, London
Just out of interest why didn't Rowan or everyone else up in arms over the Columbus tower around 3-4 years ago when the near identical tower got planning permission the first time round from Tower Hamlets about 3 years ago.
- John Simpson, London
I don’t recall anyone mentioning anything about a statue?! Somehow people are equating the symbolism of the Olympics and regeneration with a dictator, a bizarre leap in logic. Symbolic structures, especially landmark ones are successful; it is a simple concept to grasp, history and the world are littered with much loved creations, from a myriad of Cathedrals to the Eiffel Tower, Statue of Liberty and the London Eye to name just a few. I would like to hear someone argue that we are somehow worse off with them!
With regards to buildings in general of course they should be scrutinised more design-wise however there just is not the expertise in the planning system for this and it will require more resources, there was a start with design for London team but then the current administration got rid of that. We need to put our money where our mouth is.
By the way, in aesthetic terms the taller a building is the more slender and elegant it appears to the eye and creates skyline interest. All previous "democratic" interventions by conservationist groups, conservative councils and nimby residential groups have left us with petty and ill-considered design interventions ie token height reductions that have given us poorer aesthetics less useable street, less useable building space and developers cutting costs all round, the worst of all worlds.
Food for thought.
- B Marsden, London
This tower, which was already approved by Tower Hamlets many years ago (it was just up for a renewal of its planning permission), is planned for Canary Wharf. If tall buildings are wrong in Canary Wharf, where can they possibly be built? I actually think this is a great design for a building.
- Stanley, London
Hear! Hear! Simon Ellis. Saddam's craving of public statues to self glory was the first thing that sprang to mind on reading the Standard's article on this the other day. Boris is a stuntsman, as was so embarrassingly demonstrated by his antics at the Beijing Olympics ceremony. Mittal must be desperate for public recognition to align himself to the (piffle tower) project and any stunts of Boris Johnson's in general.
- Nicholas Dean, London
I lived in Iraq for a short period in the 1990s. Saddam had an obsession for gigantic statues - they were everywhere. If we want to look like a banana republic let's ruin our skyline with this type of utter rubbish.
- Simon Ellis, London
