The Walkie Talkie

London has always had a complicated relationship with skyscrapers.

For most of the 20th century, the old City of London remained relatively low and conservative. St. Paul’s Cathedral still dominated the skyline, and planners were extraordinarily protective of the views surrounding it. Then, in 1992, a massive IRA bomb exploded outside the Baltic Exchange, a beautiful old building in the heart of London’s financial district. The building was so badly damaged that, after years of arguments over whether it could be saved, it was eventually demolished.

That left a valuable hole in the middle of one of the most expensive pieces of real estate in the world.

Swiss Re bought the site and hired the famous British architect Norman Foster to design its new headquarters. Foster proposed something London had never really seen before: a 41-story glass tower that was round in the middle, tapered at both ends and covered in a spiraling lattice of steel.

Its official address was 30 St Mary Axe.

Nobody called it that.

Londoners took one look at the thing and called it the Gherkin — British slang for a pickle.

The nickname stuck, and remarkably, so did the affection. When the building opened in 2004, people loved it. It won architectural awards, became one of the most recognizable buildings in Britain and helped convince London’s planners that perhaps the city’s skyline could handle a little more experimentation.

Soon the proposals started arriving.

There was the Cheesegrater. The Shard. One proposed tower became the Helter-Skelter. London’s financial district began to resemble a collection of gigantic household objects, each designed by an internationally famous architect trying to produce the next building people would recognize instantly in a photograph.

Into this atmosphere came Rafael Viñoly.

Viñoly was an acclaimed Uruguayan-born architect with offices in New York and projects around the world. His proposal was for a site at 20 Fenchurch Street, several blocks south of the main cluster of City skyscrapers.

It was an awkward place for a tower.

Even London’s chief planner, Peter Rees, later admitted that his first reaction was essentially: not here.

But Viñoly’s design was hard to ignore.

Most skyscrapers get narrower as they rise. His would do the opposite. The lower floors would be relatively small, but as the tower climbed, each floor would become wider than the one beneath it. The sides would gradually bow outward until the building appeared almost top-heavy, with a broad glass crown hanging over a much narrower base.

There was a very practical reason for this.

Office space becomes more valuable as you go higher. The best views are at the top. The prestige is at the top. The highest rents are at the top. So instead of putting the largest floors near the ground, Viñoly’s design put the largest floors where they were worth the most money.

One advertisement for the project summed up the concept beautifully:

“Big thinkers need big floors.”

Architecture critics later described the building as practically a diagram of the financial forces that created it. The building literally got fatter as the real estate became more valuable.

The shape also gave Londoners another opportunity to do what they apparently enjoy doing to skyscrapers.

They gave it a nickname.

Seen from the side, the narrow bottom and swollen top vaguely resembled the handheld radios people used before cell phones became ubiquitous.

The Walkie Talkie.

It was not necessarily meant as a compliment.

Critics hated the building long before anyone had actually built it. English Heritage warned that its size and location would overwhelm historic parts of London. UNESCO objected to its effect on views around the Tower of London. There was a public inquiry. Opponents described the design as oppressive, overwhelming and brutally dominant.

But the developers had an ace up their sleeve.

At the very top of the building would be a spectacular three-story public garden, 500 feet above London. Anyone could theoretically ride the elevator up and look across the Thames, toward the Shard and back over the forest of new skyscrapers filling the City.

Eventually, even Peter Rees came around. He began describing the Walkie Talkie as the “figurehead at the prow of our ship,” a place from which Londoners could stand above the city and admire what the financial district was becoming.

Planning permission was granted.

Then almost immediately, the world economy fell apart.

The financial crisis froze major real-estate development across London, and the Walkie Talkie project was put on hold. For a while, it looked as if the strange tower might remain nothing more than an architect’s rendering.

But in 2010, with London’s commercial property market still sluggish, Land Securities and Canary Wharf Group decided to make a very large bet. They formed a joint venture and committed to building the roughly £500 million tower anyway. Their thinking was that by the time construction finished, the economy and demand for premium office space would have recovered.

Construction began in earnest.

By 2012, the skeleton of the building was rising over Fenchurch Street. Londoners could finally see whether the drawings had done it justice.

They had.

The Walkie Talkie looked ridiculous.

Its enormous upper floors seemed to lean over the streets below. As workers covered the exterior in glass, the building began to resemble a giant shiny radio standing upright among London’s older stone buildings.

The jokes continued.

The developers didn’t particularly care. The economics were working exactly as planned. Those huge upper floors provided enormous amounts of expensive office space, and businesses were signing leases.

By the summer of 2013, the building was nearing completion.

A few streets away was a man named Martin Lindsay.

Lindsay ran a tiling company in Essex. On Thursday, August 29, 2013, he drove into the City for a series of business meetings.

He drove a Jaguar XJ.

This wasn’t some anonymous company hatchback. The XJ was Jaguar’s big luxury sedan: long, low, expensive and unmistakably British. Lindsay’s was a high-specification model. Whatever he had paid for it, he clearly cared about it. When reporters later spoke to him, his reaction wasn’t detached curiosity. He was gutted.

That afternoon, Lindsay found a parking space on Eastcheap, just a short distance from the unfinished Walkie Talkie.

He parked at about 12:45 and went to his meetings.

Nothing about this decision should have required any particular thought. It was a legal parking space on an ordinary London street. The weather was warm and sunny, but this was London, not Death Valley.

About an hour or two later, Lindsay returned.

As he approached his car, he noticed a photographer standing nearby taking pictures. The photographer said something along the lines of, “Have you seen that car? The owner won’t be happy.”

Lindsay looked.

Then he had to explain that he was the owner.

Something had happened to the Jaguar.

The panels along one side were warped. The plastic casing around the wing mirror had softened and deformed. Part of the Jaguar badge had melted. There was a smell of burned plastic around the car.

Lindsay later took it to Jaguar. The technicians reportedly told him they had never seen anything like it. Parts of the vehicle were subjected to significant heat during the manufacturing and painting process. Whatever had happened on Eastcheap had generated a remarkable amount of heat.

For a moment there was an obvious question.

What on earth had happened to Martin Lindsay’s car?

Then somebody looked up.

High above Eastcheap stood the enormous curved wall of glass belonging to the Walkie Talkie.

The building’s south-facing façade was slightly concave. Thousands of square feet of reflective glass were catching sunlight and bouncing it downward.

But because of the curve, those rays weren’t scattering.

They were converging.

The Walkie Talkie had accidentally become a 500-foot-tall magnifying glass.

And Martin Lindsay had parked his Jaguar almost exactly at the focal point.

Once people realized what was happening, the story became increasingly absurd.

A heating-and-air-conditioning engineer named Eddie Cannon parked his van nearby and discovered that plastic throughout the vehicle had melted. Even a bottle of Lucozade sitting inside looked as though it had been baked.

Across the street, workers at a barbershop noticed smoke coming from their doormat. Bottles of shampoo and hair products began to melt. At a nearby Vietnamese restaurant, paint bubbled and tiles cracked.

The City of London finally suspended several parking spaces beneath the building.

Naturally, reporters arrived.

And naturally, someone brought a frying pan.

They placed it in the concentrated sunlight on the pavement, cracked an egg into it and watched it cook.

The Walkie Talkie had earned a new nickname.

The Walkie Scorchie.

That alone would be a wonderful story.

But the detail that makes it extraordinary came afterward.

Rafael Viñoly admitted that the possibility of reflected heat had not been completely overlooked. They had actually considered it during the design process. They had modeled it.

According to Viñoly, their calculations suggested the concentrated heat might reach around 36 degrees Celsius — about 97 degrees Fahrenheit.

Instead, it was closer to 72 degrees Celsius.

About 162 degrees Fahrenheit.

“We made a lot of mistakes with this building,” Viñoly eventually acknowledged.

The developers installed temporary screening and eventually added permanent sunshades to the façade. The building survived. So did Martin Lindsay’s Jaguar.

And London got one more nickname for its skyline.

The Gherkin had helped usher in an era when architects competed to give London increasingly distinctive buildings. The Walkie Talkie certainly succeeded at being distinctive.

It just turned out that somebody had accidentally given it a feature nobody had asked for.

There is something about complicated solutions that appeals to us.

A normal rectangular office building is boring. A building that gets wider as it rises, maximizes the value of its most desirable floors, creates a dramatic new skyline and puts a public garden 500 feet in the air is interesting. It is clever. It gives architects something to talk about and developers something to put on the brochure.

And none of those things are necessarily bad.

But every additional moving part creates another opportunity for something to behave differently than expected.

I see versions of this in financial planning all the time.

Someone comes across an elaborate insurance strategy, a complicated trust, a special tax maneuver, a structured investment product or an investment strategy involving six different accounts moving money back and forth. There is usually a beautifully logical explanation for why it should work.

Sometimes it really is the right answer.

But complexity has a cost that rarely appears in the sales presentation.

The more complicated a plan becomes, the more assumptions have to be correct. There are more tax rules to understand, more deadlines to remember, more people who need to execute correctly and more opportunities for something to change twenty years from now that nobody thought about today.

Simple plans have risks too, of course. But simple plans have fewer places for surprises to hide.

A plain diversified portfolio isn't particularly exciting. Saving consistently isn't clever. Keeping reasonable cash reserves, buying appropriate insurance, minimizing taxes where it makes sense and periodically updating an estate plan won't get anyone invited to speak at a financial conference.

But there is something powerful about a plan you can explain on one sheet of paper.

The Walkie Talkie wasn't a failure because its architects were stupid. Quite the opposite. Some extremely talented people designed an extraordinarily sophisticated building. They thought about the sunlight problem. They modeled it. They even calculated the temperature.

What they couldn't calculate perfectly were all of the consequences created by doing something that had never been done quite that way before.

Had they built a boring glass rectangle, Martin Lindsay probably would have gone to his meetings, returned to his Jaguar and driven home without ever appearing in a newspaper.

Nobody would remember the building.

But it also wouldn't have melted his car.

There are times in finance when sophisticated is necessary. There are problems where the elegant, complicated answer really is better.

But before choosing it, there is a question worth asking:

What problem would I never have to solve if I simply kept this simple?