The Flying Cathedral or the Wobbly Bridge

I took this picture in the Millennium Bridge, facing St. Paul's cathedral and having the Tate Modern at my back. Doesn't it look like St. Paul were just flying on the river Thames?

I'm more than sure I'm not the first one to take such picture, but I wonder if the architect was concious about the impression he was creating when thinking of a ramp which would go down in between the ramp itself, or it was just a lack of space left by the massive Tate Mordern's monolithic brick building and the need for a gentle slope to get on the bridge without a staircase which prevented him from building a ramp in a more orthodox way.

Seriously, I have my doubts, since this guy managed to design a pretty ugly and scary bridge after all, known among Londoners by the nickname of the Wobbly Bridge, a bridge that wobbles more than the one in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

Who is the architect, then? Norman Foster. He also designed the Collserola's Tower in Barcelona, a huge curved triangular prism hanging from a pole like a mainsail. In the first design, he forgot a way to keep the sail stable, leaving the whole structure free to rotate along the pole. In my first year at university in 1991, I assisted to a lecture given by the group of engineers who had fixed that problem with cables attaching the sail onto the firm ground.

Who on earth needs a castle flying in the sky? Just a swift Laputa, maybe.