Speaking for themselves, on the St. Giles Mixed Use Development, Renzo Piano Building Workshop:

Located in Camden, the project is part of a complex urban patchwork of medieval streets, modern buildings and traditional urban blocks. This environment had a dramatic impact on the design of the project.

The scheme is composed of complex volumes, which are characteristically chiselled, fragmented, and reduced in scale to match the surrounding buildings. These chiselled volumes make St-Giles an impressive architectural sculpture characterized by a combination of shimmering facets.

Each facet is unique, differing in height, orientation, colour, and relationship to natural light. Glass, steel and ceramic are the primary elements of the skin. In each facet the ceramic is used in different shades and colours that respond to the surrounding building, thus helping to integrate the scheme in the immediate urban environment.

A critique of Renzo Piano on context and function:

Renzo Piano’s Central St Giles project has put commercial architecture on the media map for the first time in many years – not since Sir James Stirling’s No 1 Poultry in the City have we encountered such a wilfully vivid mixed-use building. Yet there is a risk that Central St Giles will convey a false sense of worth by suggesting that the design of so-called rent slabs is all about dramatic, “because you’re worth it” architectural implants.

Architects, developers and planners will serve our towns and cities better if they face up to the fact that commercial architecture need not be predicated on glib non-ideas about the hearts and souls of forgotten places. They must instead address what Eric Parry describes so elegantly as “the finesse of the relationship between the mercantile world and very brave architecture”. That is the real challenge. And gift-wrapping buildings isn’t the answer. (The Independent 6/3/10)