in a web of glass, pinned to the edges of vision

The new feature of London's skyline

colubra

5/7/04 03:36 pm

For those of you who have NOT been to London lately, they've built a new skyscraper.
It won international awards. It has floodlights with greenish tinge playing on it at night.
The Londoners, god love them, could not decide if they should mock it for looking like a marital aid or for looking like a pickle, and in a beauty of the portmanteau insult, they have unofficially christened it 'The Erotic Gherkin'.
Here is a Londoner's blog entry on the building, with a good picture of this weird thing.

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• susannochka

  5/7/04 03:48 pm (UTC)

  

  my god, it's fabulous.
  I mean, hideous.
  fabu-
  I can't make up my mind, but it's fascinating nonetheless...
  

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  • colubra

    5/7/04 03:54 pm (UTC)

    

    I am going to London in September.
    I intend to go to the restaurant and eat there while in town, so I can enter the Erotic Gherkin.

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• tyee

  5/7/04 03:50 pm (UTC)

  

  OMG! I saw that when we were there in February and I wondered wtf it was. Although I did not see it at night, so I missed out on the greenish tinge. It really does look cool in the daytime, though, because it has some really cool reflections of everything around it.

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• paradisacorbasi

  5/7/04 04:04 pm (UTC)

  

  I think it's pretty.
  
  But I think it more resembles an underfed Faberge egg, myself.
  
  

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  • enzeru

    5/7/04 08:39 pm (UTC)

    I was thinking 'Faberge dildo', myself.

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• feyandstrange

  5/7/04 04:23 pm (UTC)

  My God.
  
  I applaud it. It will give London something to point at and make wry comments about for *years*. Thank goodness. The BT tower was getting old.
  
  Oddly enough, it's built on the site of a rather large IRA bomb blast which I took a near miss on, and then got woken up by the IRA blowing up their truck full of leftover explosives under a highway on-ramp out near Golders Green. Big boom.
  
  And someone, somewhere, has got to be making commemorative buttplugs. Or will they? What would be the point? You'd look at the thing and say "It's a funny buttplug", not "Ho ho! It's a marital aid that looks like the BT Tower!"
  
  And I know, in my heart of hearts, that someday it will wear a Red Nose for Red Nose Day. And I want to see pictures.

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• surreality

  5/7/04 05:02 pm (UTC)

  

  I think it's pretty, but then, I think it looks like one of those encased-helix borosilicate glass sex toys, and I've always thought those were pretty. `Erotic Gherkin' is damnably apt.

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• ahkond

  5/7/04 07:16 pm (UTC)

  

  Cool. On my way to work I often go past this bit of imposing whimsy at MIT.

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  • colubra

    5/7/04 08:17 pm (UTC)

    

    Daaang, that thing looks like it's going to jump you if you walk too close to it.

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  • eldritch00

    5/8/04 11:06 pm (UTC)

    

    Now I can't decide which one is cooler: the Stata Center or the Erotic Gherkin. *grins*

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• Beep Beep Beep,Meps Meps..

  blackthorne6

  5/7/04 10:09 pm (UTC)

  I dunno..I immediately thought of the Coneheads on SNL.
  It also reminds me of Shrek,
  "Maybe he's compensating for something?"
  

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