Firstly, just want to remind you guys that there are only 3 weeks in my Skyscraper Competition. so if you have a project you are working on, hurry and submit it. I would love to see your work.

Commonly known as the Swiss Re building or the Gherkin, this tower was actually never intended to look like this. The site is the former site of the Baltic Exchange building, which was bombed by the Provisional Irish Republican Army. Plans for the Millennium Tower were made (a 386m tall tower), but due to it being called "out of scale" the project was scrapped and a new idea was conceived.

The Gherkin is a 40 story, 180m tower designed by Norman Foster and Partners. It utilizes a diagrid structure on the exterior to add to the stiffness of the building while reducing the amount of steel used. The building's unique design also lowers the wind load on the building. Inside the building are atria that rotate along the dark glazed part of the facade, and this allows for a stacked ventilation system that reduces the energy costs of the building by nearly 50%, even though they are capped every six floors (due to code regulations mandating a firecap on spaces that are higher than six floors). The tower is capped with a dome, which resembles the dome the Baltic exchange had, and is the only piece of curved glass in the entire building

This was one of my most challenging builds. And figuring out the facade structure was nothing short of a nightmare, and i did the best that i could. This building is 1:1 scale (granted to get the shape better, it is two meters taller). I tried to include the most notable features in the building from its diagrid structural pattern and the glazing (the atria, the bar, restaurant on the 38th and 39th floors, and some furnishing/lighting on the other floors will come later). This is on the South Peninsula district of the Peninsula quarter of my city (south of my Echo Tower). If you have any suggestions as to how to better accurately create the structure, please let me know, and i may try to update it. Thanks.

Dimensions: 55 x 55 x 183

Using High Rossferry City Texture Pack
Thank you Darkone55




30 St. Mary Axe (The Gherkin) by jduartemiller is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.