Is This London's Most Ridiculous Skyscraper?

Dean Nicholas
By Dean Nicholas Last edited 152 months ago

Last Updated 16 February 2012

Is This London's Most Ridiculous Skyscraper?
The mile-high "eco tower"
The mile-high "eco tower"
Mile-high living
Mile-high living
Smooth impact at ground level.
Smooth impact at ground level.

We were bemused yesterday to see the plan for a rotating tower, a pipe dream that will surely never see as much as a spade dug in anger. Yet it's not the most ridiculous skyscraper ever planned for the city. That honour goes to the mile-high eco tower pictured above.

Proposed in 2008, the tower was conceived as a radical solution to London's housing crunch, capable of housing up to 100,000 residents — the number of additional people needing to be homed every year in the capital. With no small understatement, the developers stated that their baby would

create a new and completely different scale to the existing city forming a separate layer superimposed above London's ancient and idiosyncratic street plan

That's putting it mildly. We can almost hear the heart palpitations from English Heritage and Clarence House as traditionalists consider the damage done to sight-lines.

The plan was, obviously, never a serious one. In fact we considered it for our Unbuilt London piece on skyscrapers, and rejected it because of its utter silliness. Let us know if you've seen anything more ridiculous.