Following is the text of an article in The Guardian newspaper from their 4th September online edition. The architect of the building in question is Rafael Vinoly:
'As Martin Lindsay and his Jaguar have just learned, large buildings can exert strange effects on their immediate surroundings. Lindsay returned last week to his car, left parked opposite a 37-storey skyscraper nearing completion at 20 Fenchurch Street in the City of London, to find its wing mirror, panels and Jaguar badge had melted.
The building's developers have paid the £946 bill to repair the damage, which they said was caused by sunlight reflected from the "Walkie Talkie" building - so-called because it appears wider at the top than the bottom. They said they were "seeking to rectify" the problem, which should occur only at certain hours of the day and certain times of the year. In the meantime, they are suspending three parking bays.
It is not the first time architects have fallen foul of the capacity of curved, reflective surfaces to focus the sun's rays into a beam concentrated enough to start a fire, a phenomenon that is apparently difficult to model, but whose effects are well enough understood to have been exploited - legend has it - by the ancient Greek inventor Archimedes against the Romans during their siege of Syracuse.
Some of the burnished stainless steel panels of Frank Gehry's Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles, which opened in 2003, had to be sanded down to prevent drivers being blinded by the glare, and pedestrians fried by pavement hotspots that reached 60C. And the crescent-shaped Vdara Hotel and Spa in Las Vegas was briefly known as "Death Ray Hotel" when it opened in 2009 after guests complained a 15 sq m area of the pool deck was hot enough to singe their hair and melt plastic. It has since used anti-reflective film, rows of umbrellas and even large plants to cure the problem.
But sunlight is not the only natural phenomenon whose effects designers have failed to predict. Manchester's 47-storey Beetham Tower, the tallest residential building in Europe when it opened in 2006, has needed work to stop it emitting a high-pitched, flute-like whistling; engineers blamed high winds hitting a thin glass blade at the top of the tower.
And the tallest building in Yorkshire, the slab-like, 32-storey Bridgewater Place in Leeds, has generated wind speeds at its base high enough to lift a lorry off its wheels, crushing a passer-by. Consultants have tried 30 different combinations of baffles and other structures to solve the "intractable" wind tunnel problems at the north end of the structure, where wind speeds have reached more than 75mph.
Jon Henley -------------------------------------------
Richard Spencer Intl. Assoc. AIA
Design Director - Aviation
Woods Bagot
Perth, Western Australia
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