Safety Fears For GreenPeace From Window Cleaning Spokesman

Free Climber & protester Ali Garrigan, yards from the top of the Shard.

The Shard: Greenpeace protesters scale Britain's tallest building - At just before 4.30am this morning six women began scaling the Shard in central London, the tallest building in western Europe, protesting on behalf of Greenpeace against oil and gas drilling in the Arctic. At 19.10 The protesters finally reached the top after more than 14 hours of climbing.

The Shard's management fear the protesters will not be able to secure themselves properly on the last stretch of building above the 72nd floor and are putting themselves in “extreme danger”.  The six women have been climbing for more than ten hours now, and will soon run out of places to secure themselves, it is feared. 

A spokesperson said: "The maintenance team we have working on the Shard is probably one of the most experienced abseiling teams in the world. "The window cleaning guys who work in the cradle are unbelievably experienced and work on buildings all over the capital, they do a maximum shift of two hours." "These guys have been on the go since four this morning, they must be absolutely shattered. "It's freezing cold in the wind and then the sun hits you, apparently when you are extremely tired that makes it extremely dangerous."

The group are named as Ali Garrigan, 27, from Nottinghamshire, Sabine Huyghe, 33, from Ghen in Belgium, Sandra Lamborn, 29, from Stockholm in Sweden, Liesbeth Deddens, 31, from Groningen in the Netherlands, Victoria Henry, 32, from London, and Wiola Smul, 34, from Poland. They are believed to have climbed onto the 72-storey building from the roof of London Bridge station in the early hours of this morning.

According to the spokesperson the climbers will run out of places to secure themselves, should they pass the viewing platform level. He said: "The group is spread out over a number of different floors and the lead climber is ahead of them and is therefore helping the others up the building. "We are worried that they think there is something they can use to get them all the way to the top, there isn't enough of the structure. "They have been using a purely cosmetic architectural element of the building. It's never been designed for climbing on or to be used for anything like that. It's purely part of the architect's design of the building. "They have been using parts of that to climb on, but as we said from the moment they started the danger is that the closer you get to the top there is no more of that structure available. That's been communicated with them throughout."

As the protestors near the five-storey viewing platform the decision has been made to close it to the public. The spokesperson explained: "Building's emergency response team has advised that the viewing platforms should be closed at this stage which is at the top of the building. "Only essential staff will remain there at this time. There is various bits they can open and various access points, but everyone within a certain area needs to be roped up and wearing harnesses. "The ambulance service are at the top, and can therefore assess their condition and give them fluids. "Because they are getting closer to it, and the viewing platform may well be the part that we get them back into the building." "It has been closed so that we can safely get them into the building because at some point, particularly with how tired they must be, they may need to come in and that's the best place to get them in."

A spokesman for the Shard's owners said they had tried to persuade the women to come inside at various access pointsbut they had refused, and continued up the building. Wind speeds of up to 64km/h had been recorded during the morning and the building's abseiling team, responsible for window cleaning and general maintenance, would not go out if they reached 40km/h. When asked if it was necessary to close the entire platform they said: "Our interest is from a safety point of view of getting them into the building. "The viewing platform is big, but we can't have members of the public, emergency services and a bunch of protesters trying to come in at the same time."

More on the Shard here.

Buildering, Parkour & Free Climbing

Stunt climbers use buildings for their own causes: Renzo Piano, the Italian architect who designed the New York Times tower on 8th Avenue at 40th Street in Manhattan, made a point of keeping the building transparent at ground level. His goal, he said before the building opened last summer, was to avoid the forbidding, fortress-like appearance that marks other post-9/11 towers in Manhattan. He wanted the final product to look inviting.He may have succeeded too well. Two climbers -- the first an experienced stuntman from France who has scaled architectural landmarks all over the world, the second a copycat from Brooklyn -- gained quick access to the skyscraper on Thursday and reached the top with relative ease. The Frenchman, Alain Robert, known to his fans as Spiderman, barely seemed to break a sweat.Both men took advantage of the horizontal ceramic rods that wrap much of the tower's exterior. Though they were designed to reflect sunlight and shade the interior, they also do a pretty good impersonation of a 52-story ladder. As one post on the design website Archinect put it: "Dude, I could climb the New York Times building." The pair of incidents also introduced a new word to the pop-culture lexicon: "buildering," which means to scale a piece of architecture without any equipment. (It's adapted from the rock-climbing term "bouldering.") There is, not surprisingly, a whole series of websites devoted to the obscure hobby, including buildering.net, on which by Thursday night the message boards were buzzing with news of Robert's latest conquest. Like Robert himself, the site may be French, the tag line no more than a charming malapropism. But the phrase is a fascinating one, raising a range of questions about how people react to a piece of architecture once it's completed, and how using a building in a way that the architect or the client never intended can actually animate it in the public imagination.The best example from recent architectural history is undoubtedly the late World Trade Center. When the twin towers, designed by the Japanese architect Minoru Yamasaki, were completed in 1974, many New Yorkers found them aloof and intimidating, hulking skyscrapers built on a concrete "superblock" and detached from the life of the city around them.But even before they were completely occupied, a daredevil named Philippe Petit -- also French! -- got up on the roof and set up a high wire between the towers, 1,360 feet above the pavement. He walked back and forth eight times without any harnesses, even pausing to lie down in the middle of the wire and gaze up at the sky. (The incident is recalled in a new documentary on Petit, "Man on Wire.") Three years later, a climber named George Willig scaled the south tower using clamps he'd custom-made to fit inside the building's window-washing tracks. The stunts helped thaw the icy attitude New Yorkers had developed toward Yamasaki's design. In misinterpreting his architecture, Petit and Willig humanized it.Even politicians understood this. Then-Mayor Abe Beame, sensing that coverage of the climb might help promote the towers and distract a city in the grip of 1970s malaise, decided to fine Willig just $1.10 -- a penny for every floor.