Renzo Piano’s giant glass cube towers over the rest of the Stirling prize’s samey brick-built shortlist

If Irvine Sellar, the larger-than-life developer who gave London the 95-storey hypodermic pinnacle of the Shard, had had his way, the UK’s tallest building would have been joined by a sibling: a 72-storey residential tower soaring above Paddington Station, the pair of leviathans winking conspiratorially at each other across the capital. In the end the Paddington Pole, as it became known, attracted the feather-spitting ire of heritage bodies and community groups, and after 1,800 objections, was refused planning permission by Westminster Council.

Undaunted, Sellar and his architect Renzo Piano – the Italian imperator of hi-tech and co-designer, with Richard Rogers, of Paris’s Pompidou Centre – went back to the drawing board and simply lopped off 54 storeys. And so, in a reverse ferret that was a gift to headline writers (“Pole-axed” trumpeted Building magazine), the Pole became the Cube: an 18-storey office block, homogenous, crystalline and curiously self-effacing, despite its cubic chonk, its glacial glass walls reflecting the grey London sky.