The Shard Is All About Window Cleaners

A window cleaner works outside the 14th floor at the Shard in London. Only one Shard, but so many windows in Europe's tallest skyscraper.

Window cleaners drop in on Shard press conference: A news conference to mark the opening of the Shard was briefly interrupted by some surprise guests. Architect Renzo Piano was speaking to journalists at the event on Wednesday when a group of window cleaners appeared alongside them on the 14th floor.

A massive laser show will light up the London skyline tonight to mark the formal inauguration of the Shard Tower, with the opening ceremony due to be attended by the prime minister of Qatar and Britain’s Prince Andrew. The ceremony will mark the physical completion of the exterior of the GBP£500m (US$779m) building, which is 95 percent co-financed by Qatar and is located on the South Bank of the Thames. The tower will be the centerpiece of the US$3bn London Quarter project, which is being developed by Qatari Diar and the Sellar Property Group.

What you need to know about The Shard: London’s tallest building, The Shard, opens tonight after more than a decade of planning and building, with a laser display and 30 search lights. It sits on the River Thames, in Southwark, and earned its name when the architect, Renzo Piano, described it as a “shard of glass” during the initial planning stages. At the opening ceremony, the London Philharmonic Orchestra will play to guests such as the Prime Minister of Qatar and the Duke of York with, perhaps ironically, Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man. The building is causing divisions – is it a symbol of corporate power? Or of success? Here’s what you need to know about it...

It’s big: It’s 1,000 feet high, or 309 metres, which, as Richard Godwin in the London Evening Standard pointed out, is “almost exactly the same height” as the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s 1984. “Admittedly, The Shard does not have slogans such as ‘IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH’ and ‘FREEDOM IS SLAVERY’ written on its gleaming carapace,” but it is “visible from almost everywhere in the city.” Godwin’s views on it chimed with Winston Smith’s: “This, he thought with a sort of vague distaste – this was London, chief city of Airstrip One.”

It cost £450 million to build: Most of which, said Kevin Rawlinson in The Independent, was put up by the Qatari Royal Family. It has 600,000 square feet of office space. It has three floors of restaurants, a five star hotel that has 200 beds, 10 houses, and a viewing platform which will be open to the public, though at a price – £24.95 for an adult. The company that part owns it, Sellar Property Group, says it’s being “selective” about which companies work there, and that it’s holding back on leasing the flats. Rawlinson suggested that maybe it was prospective buyers who were being selective.

Foxes like it: A fox, named Romeo, lived at the top of the Shard, reported the BBC. It lived off scraps left by builders. Said the founder of the Riverside Animal centre, where Romeo was taken, “We explained to him that if foxes were meant to be 72 storeys off the ground, they would have evolved wings. We think he got the message and, as we released him back on to the streets of Bermondsey shortly after midnight on Sunday, he glanced at the Shard and then trotted off in the other direction.”

Urban explorers like it: An American student, Bradley Garrett, and two of his friends managed to elude security and clamber all the way up the building (from the inside – they’re not superheroes!), reported The Mirror, which ran the headline: “A shard’s day fright.”

It’s not so good for cleaners: A window cleaner got stuck near the top. Eyewitnesses saw the cradle rocking, but the cleaner was unhurt and brought back down safely. Phew. So what began as “a sketch on the back of a napkin in a Berlin restaurant in 2000″ has now become one of London’s most divisive symbols. Do you think it’s a hideous carbuncle? Or a lofty inspiration to man’s ingenuity? Let us know.