In Praise of St Giles

Renzo Piano's recent development at St Giles's Circus has been universally sneered at by architecture critics across the press, with lots of them sniggeringly suggesting it was a shoe-in for the Carbuncle Prize (a prize the world really didn't need to be set up in the first place...). Needless to say, I love it: the coloured ceramic facades, the powder-grey courtyard, the handsome grid of the frontage, the welcoming path through and the opening up of the whole plot, the sense of event it gives this rather tired and transient spot.