The Shard was designed in 2000. That year, the London-based entrepreneur Irvine Sellar decided to redevelop Southwark Towers, a 1970s office block next to London Bridge station, and flew to Berlin in March 2000 to meet Piano for lunch. According to Sellar, the architect spoke of his contempt for tall buildings during the meal, before flipping over the restaurant’s menu and sketching an iceberg-like sculpture emerging from the River Thames. He got his ideas from the railway lines next to the site, the London spires in the paintings of 18th-century Venetian painter Canaletto, and the masts of sailing ships.
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