Thomas Marks.
When we meet, Country Mouse is all talk of Appleby Fair, of the mutter of horse-dealers and the leathery smell of the animals. It’s his enthusiasm, paired with a visit to The Horse: from Arabia to Royal Ascot at the British Museum (until 30 September) that has me watching for horses and their ghosts in London this month. Sitting in the quiet July dusk of Canonbury Square, it’s not long before I imagine the clean clip of hooves in the distance…
Thomas Marks re-orientates his London bearings at the prompting of a not-so-discreet new skyscraper.
A shard is a piece that’s been broken off something else and, as such, it tends to take on an accidental and often dangerous shape. So there’s an inevitable irony in pointing out that Renzo Piano’s vast London Bridge skyscraper, known as The Shard, has now been completed. The building is an extraordinary structural achievement that’s been made to resemble a colossal fragment. Piano has gone for stylised breakage: vast staggered planes of glass, a scalene tilt, a splintered steel spire…
