As the city skyline is threatened by a frenzy of ugly skyscrapers, Oliver Wainwright picks the capital's top 10 towers that show how building big can be beautiful

Model towers … some of the City's finer specimens. Photograph: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images

As London faces a barrage of bulky towers, with 230 tall buildings planned to shoot up across the city over the coming months, here are 10 of the capital's best examples of aiming high. They prove that big doesn't necessarily mean bad, and that not every tower has to be an icon, topped with a jaunty profile or dressed in a jazzy outfit to succeed. After calling out 10 of the worst offenders last week, here's our run-down of the top 10 model performers, in the hope that some lessons might be learned from their success.

10. Natwest Tower

Location: City of London | Floors: 47 | Height: 183m | Architect: Richard Seifert | Status: Completed 1980 | Use: Office

Photograph: David Levene

Dressed in sleek silvery pin-stripes, the Natwest Tower (now Tower 42) stands with an air of suave simplicity compared to some of the more recent arrivals to the City. After a 10-year saga of construction, costing the equivalent of £230m to build in today's money, it was the tallest building in the country for a decade after completion, and the tallest building in the City for more than 30 years, until it was overtaken by the Heron Tower in 2009. Designed to resemble the Natwest logo from above, it is formed from three interlocking chevrons, extruded into a staggered cluster, with the shallow office floor-plates cantilevered out from a central concrete core. A high-tech wonder, it featured the UK's first double-decker lifts, as well as a “mail train” for distributing documents around the building.

9.Economist Plaza

Location: St James's | Floors: 16 | Height: 53m | Architect: Alison & Peter Smithson | Status: Completed, 1964. Grade II* listed | Use: Office & residential

Photograph: /flickr

An essay in how tall buildings can be successfully knitted into London's streets and provide a decent civic space at ground level, the Economist Plaza is the work of arch-Brutalists Alison and Peter Smithson, architects of the doomed Robin Hood Gardens estate in east London. While that faces the wrecking ball, the Economist complex is regarded as their masterpiece, “one of the most successful examples of urban design to be seen anywhere,” according to American architectural historian Vincent Scully, who said it was “among the most important buildings of the decade.” Framed by carefully proportioned elevations, the central square is described by English Heritage as “one of London's most memorable modern spaces, offering subtle intimations of the Greek agora, the Italian piazza and the alleys and courts of Georgian London.”

8. Mansion House Square

Location: Poultry | Floors: 20 | Height: 88m |
Architect: Ludwig Mies van der Rohe | Status: Proposed, 1969. Unbuilt | Use: Office

Image: RIBA Journal

Where the cartoon cruise-liner of James Stirling's No 1 Poultry now stands, jutting its cheeky prow towards the Bank of England, might instead have risen the slick bronzed slab of Mies van der Rohe's only project in the UK – if Prince Charles and his chums hadn't had their way. After a 25-year campaign to see it built by developer Peter Palumbo, an ardent collector of modernist houses, the scheme was turned down at public inquiry in 1985. Labelled “a glass stump better suited to downtown Chicago” by the Prince, who was an old polo team mate of the Palumbo's, the tower would have been an intelligent use of the site, freeing up space at street level for a new public square. Imagined as a place for festivals and exhibitions, this piazza would have been framed by the grand facades of the surrounding buildings, opening up views of Mansion House, Lutyens' Midland Bank and the Wren church of St Stephen Walbrook.....Continue Reading

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