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Last year UNESCO said it is reviewing the status of the Tower of London as a World Heritage Site, partly because of the way the Shard and other buildings loom over its courtyard. The future of the building is still not secure. Along with Shangri-La, some restaurants have signed leases, Sellar said, but most of the office space has not yet been rented at a time when many London-based businesses are striving to reduce costs. A report by Barclays Capital published this month finds a correlation between the construction of skyscrapers and financial crises, concluding that ambitious building projects often open just as the economy declines. It cites the economic and oil crises of the early 1970s, which coincided with the completion of the World Trade Center towers in New York and the Sears Tower in Chicago. In Malaysia the building of the Petronas Towers coincided with the Asian economic crisis on 1997. And in Dubai the Burj Khalifa
-- the world's tallest building -- went up as the emirate almost went bust. The Shard itself was hit by the credit crunch. Sellar secured funding from investment bank Credit Suisse in 2008, but the bank pulled out after Lehman Brothers crashed in September of that year. Eventually the central bank of Qatar stepped in to finance the project. Other tall buildings have been built in recent years as London has become a more vertical city
-- including Norman Foster's famous "Gherkin." But the Shard dominates them all, and is likely to become a prominent symbol of London. "You are going to see this building from everywhere in the city," said Jonathan Glancey, architecture critic at The Guardian newspaper. "It is going be the building that says `this is London,' and the message it is going to send is that London is brash, shiny and pretty bling."
[Associated
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