Talking about views of London with Webb t'other day, and we got on to the notion that there are certain 'strategic views' of St. Pauls which have to remain unhindered by new building works. One of them is from King Henry's Mound in Richmond Park, we thought. Googling around, found some stuff (but not much about this), though did chance across this fabulous diagram of the views, from a CAD application site.
"In London there is a policy to protect the 'Strategic Views' of St Paul's from encroachment by new buildings. There are 8 long views from hills overlooking London, the furthest one no less than 15 km from the Cathedral. These strategic views are defined as a series of planes and affect large sections of Central London... The image shows in red the areas affected by the strategic views. It is interesting to note there are a number of buildings breaching these - some built in the 50's to 70's before the protection of the Strategic Views became mandatory."
Found on Bentleyuser.org
I know it's a perfectly practical CAD rendering, intended for quite serious purpose, but ignoring that it reminded me of El Lissitzky (e.g.) and related Russian constructivist/photo montage work of the early 20thC (not least as it's red, black, and white), but also of Daniel Libeskind's drawings, as seen in Radix - Matrix etc. Or some image from the fevered imaginings of Ackroyd, Sinclair, or Moore.
