Architecture as a Mirror - NYTimes.com PARIS - Looking south toward the River Thames from the modest heights of Parliament Hill in north London, a vista unfolds that sometimes recalls William Wordsworth's fond prospect of the city in 1802. "Earth has not anything to show more fair," the poet proclaimed. Ships, towers, domes, theaters and temples lie/Open unto the fields and to the sky. These days, after 210 years of fires, war, industrialization, aerial bombardment, architectural whimsy and pell-mell construction, a writer would need to expand this encomium to include the skyline's newest addition - a 309.6 meter, $2.4 billion, glass-coated spire known as The Shard - and perhaps some of the fuss that has come with it. Since its formal opening in June, the 1,013-foot tower has provoked a harsh debate pitting progress against nostalgia; a duel over conflicting notions of the aesthetic; a struggle to define what cities and their buildings stand for. The newly opened tower, comprising a hotel, offices and high-ticket apartments, "has slashed the face of London forever," said one critic, Simon Jenkins. "The Thames is to become a ditch of cash running through a canyon of glass," he continued in The Guardian, referring to plans for yet more tall, glassy buildings that others see as emblems of glories to come. "The anxiety about The Shard and other ambitious skyscrapers reflects a deep anxiety about progress," said the financial journalist Daniel Ben-Ami. Rather than nervously cling on to earlier achievements, it would be far better to reach for a bolder future. This very British debate came to mind this past weekend in Paris when France celebrated the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille in 1789 with fireworks displays that strive each year to eclipse their predecessors. And perhaps the biggest, flashiest pyrotechnics of all take as their backdrop the Eiffel Tower, which, as Mr. Ben-Ami noted, drew some of the same assessments as The Shard when it was completed in 1889. Both structures claimed records for tallness. The Eiffel Tower still rears higher if you count its antennae. Both dwarfed neighboring buildings. Both drew barbs from defenders of what had been before. French artists and writers, including Émile Zola and Guy de Maupassant, inveighed against this "giddy, ridiculous tower dominating Paris like a gigantic black smokestack." But the comparison evokes another discussion, equally rooted in history yet recast for modern times. It does not, of course, take much to persuade the French and the British to snipe at one another, even when they are pretending not to. Just last week, President François Hollande of France went to London for a visit with Prime Minister David Cameron - his first to the city after two months in office. The encounter labored under recent memories of Mr. Cameron's snub of Mr. Hollande during the French presidential campaign and a subsequent remark by Mr. Cameron that he would "roll out the red carpet" for French tax exiles. "I like humor," Mr. Hollande said without much hilarity. Especially British humor. The differences go much further. In Paris, the banks of the River Seine, encrusted with beauteous building from the Cathedral of Notre Dame and the Palais du Louvre onward rank as one of Unesco's World Heritage sites. History, in other words, is nurtured and preserved, woven into the present to the extent that modernity can barely find a toe-hold. For some in London, newness trumps the past altogether. The Shard, said Mayor Boris Johnson, "is an exclamation mark that London and Britain are open for business." Business, indeed, drives many of the cross-Channel divergences. London is Europe's financial center. Its banks, however disgraced some of them may be, dominate huge stock and money markets. France seeks higher taxes on traders and investors. Britain does not. With the exception of the Montparnasse Tower, Paris keeps its high-rises in the financial district, La Défense, (where developers want to build the yet taller Hermitage twin towers at 320 meters) as Britain initially did with its steel-and-glass Canary Wharf. But with The Shard, London's high-rises have once again advanced toward the old heart of London. Seen from Parliament Hill, The Shard lowers over the dome of St. Paul's Cathedral like a neighborhood bully. London's buildings speak of sharp elbows and impatience, while the unchanging shoreline of the Seine signals no such surrender to time's advance. As Europe confronts the financial crisis in the euro zone, from which Britain excluded itself from the beginning, the gaps seem bound to widen. Bowing to euroskeptics in his own party, Mr. Cameron has spoken of a possible referendum on Britain's future relationship with the European Union. Perhaps, Mr. Hollande said in London, the European Union could proceed as a "multi-speed Europe with each country running at their own pace." If their tall buildings are anything to go by, they might also be running in opposite directions.