London’s stalled Pinnacle tower could be scrapped and replaced with a cheaper design, Building reports. The 63 storey spiral structure would have taken the title of the capital’s tallest building had it been completed, but the £1 billion development ground to a halt last year after failing to attract the 35 per cent pre-let required to allow construction to continue.
The Shard will remain London’s tallest building if the Pinnacle is scrapped
Architect Kohn Penderson Fox (KPF) was asked to redesign the building last October in a bid to resurrect the development. But now, it seems, the seven storey concrete core faces demolition following the drawing up of a rival proposal which has been dubbed the ‘austerity tower.’
The new design comes from Lipton Rogers, a development company established this year to focus on affordable office projects. At the time of its launch co-founder Stuart Lipton said;
“It is in tough times like this that the property market gets innovative. We have to think about new ways of doing things.”
KPF responded to the news by reiterating that it had an agreement with the developer to continue working on the Pinnacle and that the finance was in place for the next two years. Lipton Rogers has so far remained silent on the subject.
If the on-off Bishopsgate development is finally abandoned, The Shard -which recently announced that agreement has been reached with a number of new tenants -will remain London’s tallest skyscraper for the foreseeable future.
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This is factually incorrect – the pinnacle was never planned to be London’s tallest building.
The author clearly misread somewhere else that it was going to be the City’s tallest… Clearly they aren’t very well read because everyone knows ‘the City’ means the CITY OF LONDON, as in EC1.
Pretty shocking journalism,
We were under the impression that, had the original proposals gone ahead, the pinnacle would have been London’s tallest building. We now realise that this was incorrect and that it would only have been (still may be) the tallest in the City. Thank you for alerting us to this error.