Modern Life

To make a guess, this building from the 1960s when London yet recovering from World War II and in desperate need for commercial and residential property - pictured, Thames southside. A lot of concrete pored that decade including the BT Tower (1962, at 34 floors London's tallest from the '60s), Centre Point ('67, 35 floors, and the only sky-scraper in the West End - an abomination), Aviva Tower ('69, 28 floors), Millbank ('63, 33 floors and home of the Torry party) and of course many, many horrible cement blocks that crept up before zoning permissions in the 70s aimed to preserve our skyline. Much of the junk being torn down and rebuilt given the value of the underlying property. Buildings are, after all, a machanism to print money and the nicer the property ... so London continues to expand, including six of the city's ten largest to be completed by 2012 just in time for les jeux olympics. Of these, Renzo Piano's 'Shard of Glass" at Tower Bridge will be the European Union's tallest at 72 floors (Europe's highest will be the Russian Tower in Moscow at 1,980 feet. Let's see what oil does first). Before, the tallest-highest structure the Warsaw Radio Mast at 2,121 feet, built in 1974 but it collapsed on August 8, 1991 - technically this not a building, ok? but still that must have been a bummer. The Barbican Centre, which looks like something from the '60s, opened in 1982. J.G. Ballard would be way proud.

“I would sum up my fear about the future in one word: boring. And that's my one fear: that everything has happened; nothing exciting or new or interesting is ever going to happen again... the future is just going to be a vast, conforming suburb of the soul.”
--J.G. Ballard

"The bottom line is that complacency is a real killer for private equity firms."
--Hugh Langmuir, newly appointed Cinven Chief Exec. Cinven formerly one of Europe's top, large-cap or "mega" LBO firms.