London’s Tulip Project Rejected

Housing Minister Christopher Pincher has followed the recommendation of Planning Inspector David Nicholson, rejecting Foster + Partners’ Tulip project, Architects’ Journal reports. The decision ends years of planning wrangling, which started in 2018 when Foster + Partners submitted plans for the 305-m-tall tourist attraction for a site by the Gherkin in the City of London. The City of London approved the highly controversial skyscraper in spring 2019, but London Mayor Sadiq Khan overturned the decision, calling it an “unwelcoming, poorly designed” mega-project, the source reports. He argued the tower would offer little benefit to Londoners with no new office space or housing. In the planning inspector’s report, Nicholson said the “chosen purpose, form, materials and location have resulted in a design that would cause considerable harm to the significance of the Tower of London, and further harm to other designated heritage assets. Although considerable efforts have been made to adopt all available techniques to make the construction and operation of the scheme as sustainable as possible, incorporating a tall, reinforced concrete lift shaft would result in a scheme with very high embodied energy and an unsustainable whole lifecycle.”