{"id":330,"date":"2009-04-07T19:00:15","date_gmt":"2009-04-08T02:00:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/?p=330"},"modified":"2009-04-19T15:19:16","modified_gmt":"2009-04-19T22:19:16","slug":"30-st-marys-axe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/2009\/04\/07\/30-st-marys-axe\/","title":{"rendered":"30 St. Mary’s Axe"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Provisional IRA\u00a0 bombed the City of London\u00a0 in 1992, causing \u00a3800m in damages.\u00a0 The bomb was centered (51.5144,-0.081<\/a>) on St. Mary\u2019s Axe<\/a>, a small street off of Threadneedle.\u00a0 The street\u2019s name<\/a> is a conflation of St. Mary\u2019s Parish and a pub that used to have an axe as its symbol.\u00a0 Very English.\u00a0 Pronounced Simmery\u2019s Axe, supposedly.<\/p>\n

The bomb damaged the Baltic Exchange<\/a>, a shipping stock market of sorts, based on a coffee shop formerly named The Virginia and Baltick.\u00a0 At least one exchange employee (there were only 20 in all) was killed in the attack.\u00a0 The exchange is famous — well somewhat famous in certain circles — for publishing the Baltic Index<\/a>, a measure of shipping prices around the world that is seen by finance nerds as a good leading indicator of economic activity since there isn\u2019t any speculative action in the index (i.e., it\u2019s all real prices by real players in the wet market as it were) and because it forecasts how much demand there is for moving raw materials which then get turned into food and computers and so on in the future.\u00a0 Anyway.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The exchange couldn\u2019t afford to restore the damage, so their historic building<\/a> was dismantled and sold<\/a> to Dennis Buggins<\/a>, famous for the NY antique furniture scandal (with the brother of the guy from the previous antique furniture scandal, John and Carlton Hobbs<\/a>).\u00a0 Buggins has it listed on his website <\/a>but other reports say it was bought by an Estonian and was supposed to be set up \u2014 delicious irony this \u2014 as the Tallin Stock Market<\/a>.\u00a0 Baltics and all that, see?\u00a0 But it doesn’t look like that’s happened.<\/p>\n

The demolished building was replaced by Sir Norman Foster\u2019s so-called Gherkin whose official name is \u201c30 St. Mary\u2019s Axe<\/a>.\u201d\u00a0 Foster, who among other masterpieces designed the HSBC headquarters in Hong Kong which I think is the most beautiful office building in the world, created the Gherkin as a 600-foot approximation of a zonohedra:<\/a><\/p>\n

A zonohedron<\/strong> is a convex<\/a> polyhedron<\/a> where every face is a polygon<\/a> with point symmetry<\/a> or, equivalently, symmetry under rotations<\/a> through 180\u00b0. Any zonohedron may equivalently be described as the Minkowski sum<\/a> of a set of line segments in three-dimensional space, or as the three-dimensional projection<\/a> of a hypercube<\/a>. Zonohedra were originally defined and studied by E. S. Fedorov<\/a>, a Russian crystallographer<\/a>. More generally, in any dimension, the Minkowski sum of line segments forms a polytope<\/a> known as a zonotope<\/strong>. (Wikipedia<\/a>)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That’s what terrorism gets you.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Provisional IRA\u00a0 bombed the City of London\u00a0 in 1992, causing \u00a3800m in damages.\u00a0 The bomb was centered (51.5144,-0.081) on St. Mary\u2019s Axe, a small street off of Threadneedle.\u00a0 The street\u2019s name is a conflation of St. Mary\u2019s Parish and … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1116,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1061],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-330","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-architecture"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8jQA6-5k","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/330","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1116"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=330"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/330\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=330"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=330"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=330"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}