Albert Giralt of Renzo Piano Building Workshop reflects on Shard Place, the final piece of the Shard Quarter, and how its design completes a 25-year vision for London Bridge.
Almost 25 years have passed since Renzo Piano Building Workshop was commissioned to design The Shard. With the completion of Shard Place, the vision we set out with all those years ago has finally come to fruition. This offers an opportune moment to reflect on that journey, and on the urban quarter it has produced.
It was never about a single landmark. From the outset, the ambition was to build a piece of city: a group of buildings that could transform London Bridge not only through its skyline but through its public realm and the way people move through the area. The Shard, The News Building and now Shard Place have each contributed to this transformation, turning a fragmented and difficult-to-navigate part of London into a coherent urban destination.
Before the project began, London Bridge was one of the city’s most important transport interchanges, yet a confusing place to navigate. Below lay an intricate network of pedestrian routes; above, a concourse whose natural arrival point was blocked by a huge bus station, obscuring the railway entrance and denying the area any real civic presence. Between the two, a weak system of vertical connections did little to tie them together.
The three buildings have progressively transformed this condition. The Shard established a new identity for London Bridge and gave the station a recognisable main facade. The News Building made it possible to relocate the bus station away from the railway entrance, freeing space for a new public square that reconnected the station to the life of the street. Shard Place extends this transformation southwards: its floating mass carries the public realm beneath the building towards Guy’s Quad and Southwark, widens Joiner Street, and strengthens the connection between street and concourse with a generous south-facing staircase – designed both as a route and as a place to sit and enjoy the sun.
Together, these interventions have done more than create three related buildings. They have reorganised the urban realm, clarified movement through a complex transport interchange, brought new commercial life to the site, and created a new centre for London Bridge. The buildings function as both architecture and urban infrastructure – defining streets, squares and connections while allowing a once fragmented place to become a coherent piece of the city.
We often describe the relationship between these buildings as a ‘family.’ But a family is not a set of identical individuals – its members share certain qualities while each keeps its own character and purpose. The challenge with Shard Place was not to repeat The Shard or The News Building, but to understand what connects them beneath the surface, and reinterpret that through a residential building.
That dialogue begins at the scale of the city itself. Very early in the design process, we decided that Shard Place should never compete with The Shard, but act as its companion. Its height was deliberately limited to roughly a third of The Shard’s, establishing a clear hierarchy within the Shard Quarter and allowing each building to play its own role while reinforcing the coherence of the whole composition.
The second key decision was to step the massing of Shard Place down toward the south. The principal mass rises to roughly 100 metres in the north, toward the Thames and the long views beyond, while a lower 60 metre volume meets Southwark’s more residential scale. This stepping also protects an important sightline within the Quarter: from Borough Street to the west, The Shard’s inclined facade can still be read uninterrupted, base to summit. Shard Place is shaped to frame that diagonal, allowing The Shard to remain the dominant vertical presence.
With that relationship established through scale and massing, the question became how the dialogue could continue through material and detail. The kinship between the three buildings is also expressed in their response to light. All three use glass to capture the changing light and reflect the shifting sky of London. Rather than presenting heavy, opaque volumes, they respond almost like ‘atmospheric instruments,’ evolving throughout the day and across the seasons.
In The Shard, the building geometry is used to catch and reflect the changing sky. At The News Building, individually inclined glass panels similarly catch and reflect the light, while deeper metal fins add greater depth and a more pronounced rhythm. At Shard Place, this shared interest in light and reflection is expressed at a more intimate scale, through finely layered glass louvres that bring depth, texture and a much finer grain to the facade.
These louvres are not decoration. They provide natural ventilation, act as balustrades, soften solar gain, and create a richer relationship between interior and exterior. Where opaque panels are needed for thermal performance and solar control, they are treated as insulated shadow boxes behind an external louvred skin, so the facade’s rhythm never breaks.
This layering gives the building a domestic character while keeping the crystalline quality shared across the Shard Quarter. From a distance, Shard Place reads as part of the same architectural family as its siblings; up close, its finer grain and residential identity come through. And because the louvres are so transparent, opening the full-height inner windows creates something rare in a high-rise: interiors that feel genuinely open to the air outside.
The wintergardens extend this idea of mediation between inside and outside. Positioned at the corners of the facades, their high transparency and lightweight construction help break down the perceived mass of the three buildings while enriching the spatial experience from the inside.
At Shard Place, this condition is particularly important. Conceived as projecting balconies, the wintergardens extend the living spaces of the apartments and create a more immediate dialogue between the home and the city beyond. Sheltered from the elements but open to daylight, natural ventilation and the changing weather, they offer a softer transition between the domestic interior and the life of London Bridge beyond.
Now that the Quarter is complete, what satisfies me most is how naturally it all reads on the ground. Visitors do not experience The Shard, The News Building and Shard Place as three separate design exercises undertaken decades apart. They experience a continuous piece of city – one that has been allowed to grow and change while holding onto an underlying coherence.
That, to me, is the real measure of success. A building cannot be judged in isolation. It has to listen to what is already there and answer it thoughtfully, at every scale – from the skyline and the public realm down to the detail of a louvre and the experience of opening a window.
Shard Place was never meant to be read on its own. It was always meant to complete a sentence that we began writing 25 years ago.
Albert Giralt is partner and director at Renzo Piano Building Workshop