Play it again, Sam

Possibly unfairly, Renzo Piano may be best-known in the UK for being Richard Rogers' partner on the design for Paris' Pompideau Centre. They went their own ways after that and, while Rogers has built masses here, Piano's work is less well known.


That may be about to change: as well as designing The Shard (which will be London's tallest tower, on a site over London Bridge station), his Central St Giles scheme at the fag end of Oxford Street is about to open.


It's vast. A huge site, previously occupied by an immensely dull 1960s hulk used by the Ministry of Defence (or, as rumours had it, one or other of our revolting intelligence services), Piano's brief was to produce more than a quarter of a million square feet of office space and around 100 flats, as well as associated restaurants and what I call "shops" (they call them "retail outlets").


Piano has followed the well-worn route of breaking down the visual bulk of the complex by making it look like lots of individual buildings. But he's used a new method of doing that in grey old modern London: extraordinarily brightly-coloured ceramic tiling.


Using primary colours (or perhaps I mean primary school colours), Piano's building is very noticeable indeed.


There's no mistaking which building is peeking over the rooftops.


He was allowed a 10% bigger budget than would be normal for a scheme of this size, to be used to produce something that was of obviously higher quality than the norm.


I have to say, I think he's succeeded. I didn't care for it at first, my focus on the colours distracting me from the sophistication of the scheme.


But now I've lived with it since last August (which is when the ceramics were first applied), I have to say it's growing on me. A lot.


Big office blocks are inherently soulless places, hostile to the immediate environment and dehumanising (if you haven't ever watched Jacques Tati's great film Playtime, go and do so right now. It makes that point far more eloquently than I ever could).


But Central St Giles has created new public spaces as part of its brief, and a generous frontage (and overhang) for those shops, providing protection from the elements and a sense of welcome that very few of these schemes ever manage (just go and hang around outside Norman Foster's Gherkin in The City if you want to see how rubbish most architects are at adding to the public domain).


And, lest we forget, ceramic has long been used as a building material here -- the Victorians loved it, and in the Edwardian era ox-blood red exterior wall tiles were used all over London by the Underground.


In case you were wondering, the "aerial" shots aren't mine (all the others are). The overheads were taken from the giant Centre Point office block next door.


Now that's a building that really shouldn't have been built.