Tower 42 is the tallest building in the City of London at 183 metres compared to 179.8 metres for its neighboring 30 St Mary Axe.
Built in 1980 by Architects Seifert and Partners, Tower 42 was originally home to the Natwest Bank with rumours that its unique shape mirrored the Natwest’s logo at the time. This seems to be however an urban myth, the building is now an office complex with a restaurant on the 42nd floor offering views of London.
The panorama is captured using the same bracketing technique as the previous Swiss Re image.
We also feature Tower 42 in Google Earth as a 3D Model, you can read the post on it and download the KMZ from here.
You can view the panorama in QuickTime VR (3.4Mb).
Tower 42 is the tallest building in the City of London at 183 metres compared to 179.8 metres for its neighboring 30 St Mary Axe.
Built in 1980 by Architects Seifert and Partners, Tower 42 was originally home to the Natwest Bank with rumours that its unique shape mirrored the Natwest’s logo at the time. This seems to be however an urban myth, the building is now an office complex with a restaurant on the 42nd floor offering views of London.
The panorama is captured using the same bracketing technique as the previous Swiss Re image.
We also feature Tower 42 in Google Earth as a 3D Model, you can read the post on it and download the KMZ from here.
You can view the panorama in QuickTime VR (3.4Mb).
The Swiss Re building, more formally known as 30 St Mary Axe, was completed in 2003 and officially opened in 2004. At 180m its inspiration can be traced back to the Willis Faber and Dumas Headquarters built in 1975 by Fosters and Partners.
The panorama is captured using High Dynamic Ranging, known as HDR, based on 21 photographs from a single nodal point. Bracketing is used to under and over expose each location, resulting in 3 images per ‘click point’ on the panorama.
Combining these images, prior to stitching, provides a wider range of shadow depth and balanced lighting compared to normal exposures. This is especially important in panoramic imaging due to the range of light levels across a scene.
The panorama can be viewed in full screen via the QuickTime plugin, allowing you to look around the scene in 360×180 degrees at high resolution (2.9Mb)