The Shard

The Shard is a tall tower in London. Its outside is covered in glass.

It gets thinner and thinner as it goes up. At the very top, it ends in sharp points.

The Shard stands in London, right next to London Bridge Station, one of the city's busiest transport hubs. It is a skyscraper: a very tall building with many floors.

The building's owners call it Western Europe's tallest building. The Council on Vertical Urbanism, which keeps records of tall buildings, measures it at 306 meters, while the Shard's own website gives 309.6 meters. Its outside is made of eight sloping walls of glass, and its top is an open frame of steel.

The Shard rises at 32 London Bridge Street beside London Bridge Station. The Council on Vertical Urbanism (CVU), which ranks the world's tall buildings, lists it at 306 m to its tip, with 73 floors above ground and 3 below; the building's owners give 309.6 m and 95 stories, with level 72 the highest habitable floor.

The owners describe it as Western Europe's tallest building. The CVU's own text calls it a 'vertical city' crowned with a steel-framed pinnacle and clad with shards of glass designed to blend into the sky.

The Shard has 11,000 glass panels. Their color changes with the weather.

Near the top, visitors can look out over London.

Renzo Piano took ideas from the spires of London's churches and the masts of tall ships in old paintings. Eight sloping glass faces, the 'shards', give the tower its shape. Openings in the gaps between them, called 'fractures', let fresh air into winter gardens.

The tower is like a city stacked up: offices on the lower floors, then restaurants, a hotel, and homes higher up. On floors 68 to 72, a viewing gallery 244 meters above the city lets visitors see up to 64 kilometers on a clear day.

Piano drew on London's church spires and the ships' masts painted by the 18th-century Venetian artist Canaletto. Eight sloping facades of extra-white glass break up the building's bulk and reflect light in changing ways, so its color shifts with the weather and seasons. The double-skin facade has blinds that react to the light, and vents in the 'fractures' between the shards ventilate winter gardens.

The uses are stacked to fit the narrowing floors: offices on the large lower floors, restaurants and bars on levels 31–33, a hotel on levels 34–52, apartments on levels 53–65 and the viewing gallery on floors 68–72. Its 36 elevators, some double-decker, travel at up to 6 meters per second.

This photo was taken from another tall building. Can you find the open window? A crane lowers window cleaners from there!

This photo was taken on 14 April 2015 from the Sky Garden, high up in another London skyscraper nicknamed the 'Walkie-Talkie'. The photographer stood about 750 meters away.

Look for one open window on the glass. The photographer explains that it lets a crane lower a box that holds the window cleaners. Far below lie rooftops and streets.

The photograph (14 April 2015, by Colin, a Wikimedia Commons featured picture) was stitched from 28 frames taken from the balcony of the Sky Garden at the top of the 'Walkie-Talkie' building, about 750 m from the Shard and roughly halfway up its height. It shows the tapering glass faces, the open steel frame of the spire and one open window, which the photographer notes allows a crane to lower a box that holds the window cleaners.

The viewing gallery welcomed one million visitors in its first year, and the building's owners report that it is designed to move up to 300–400 mm in winds reached once every 50 years.