Far removed from China and the Middle East, where super-tall buildings are sprouting like weeds, there’s a spectacular 1,017-foot tall, 72-story glass tower taking shape. It’s the London Shard, under construction in the south side of the city near London Bridge. Designed by Renzo Piano Building Workshop, the Shard will be Europe’s tallest building. But unlike so many other contemporary skyscrapers, which are obsessed with sheer height, the Shard has rather complex ambitions. Its state-of-the-art frame and cladding systems were designed to maximize energy and materials conservation. Its planning, begun in 2000, was refined after 9/11 to incorporate stringent fireproofing and exit guidelines. And it wasn’t conceived as a stack of office floors but as a kind of vertical village, with atriums to connect interior spaces. The tower will house offices below and, above them, restaurants, a hotel, and observation galleries. Right now floor framing has been completed and cladding and construction of the pinnacle are underway, with the building scheduled for completion in May 2012.

Though the Shard won’t challenge skyscrapers like the Burj Khalifa or the Shanghai World Financial Center in height, it’s bound to eclipse them in character. Similar to One World Trade Center in New York City, which is also in mid-construction, the Shard has gently canting walls that give it a distinctive, pyramid-like shape. But it has a much smaller, triangular footprint than the New York tower, and doesn’t resolve itself into a neat geometry. Its sides will taper to slender, asymmetrical panes at the very top that pull away from the core like petals. Renzo Piano is renown for making buildings with simple, striking volumes and finely-layered glass skins, so there’s little doubt that the Shard’s exterior shell will be beautifully rendered. Its tall, attenuated profile will furnish a fresh icon for the city. And the tower will make a graceful partner for the faceted, cigar-shaped tower that architect Norman Foster built in 2003 across the river at 30 St. Mary Axe, better known as the Gherkin. Like that other tower, the Shard will wear its not-entirely-flattering nickname with pride.

The movie Margin Call tracks, over one crucial day, the collapse of a fictional investment bank in New York City. It shows us the the city very literally from the perspective of the bankers – as a dreamy blur as from the back of a chauffeured black car at night, and, from inside their offices at dawn, as a soft blanket far below. In tracking the movements of its protagonists through the workday it maps the anatomy of an office building – the sea of traders desks, the glassy corner offices, the marble-lined executive washroom, and the lifeless, manicured plaza.

Very deliberately, I think, the movie doesn’t show us the building from outside. It’s curious because the office tower might be, with the exception of the single family house, the most resonant of architectural forms. The office tower remains, all over the world, a powerful symbol for New York, for America, for banks, for money, and for power. The absence of this very fundamental image in the movie left me longing for the Twin Towers. It made me realize how much I miss those buildings, which I’d always understood as the platonic ideal of skyscrapers. In the months after they fell, each time I crossed Sixth Avenue and turned downtown, I felt their absence viscerally, as a physical imbalance, as if a mountain had been ripped out and taken away. I’ve never lived or work downtown, I don’t know anyone who worked inside the buildings, and I don’t observe the anniversary of the attacks. But I miss the towers. Each time I think of a skyscraper I think of them.