Word: fostered
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...Foster can handle both with equal aplomb. In 1993 he completed a cultural center for the French city of Nimes, in Provence. It is right next to the city's most famous Roman monument, the so-called Maison Carree--a Corinthian temple dedicated to Augustus' sons in the year A.D. 4. It was Thomas Jefferson's favorite classical building--in fact, Jefferson based his whole conception of Neo-Classical architecture on it--and one obviously had to approach such a historical object with caution. Would the solution be a pastiche historical arts center? Foster was sure not. "I went there...
...same kind of thinking occurs in Foster's unfinished project for the British Museum. When its library moved to massive new premises a mile away, it left behind one of the great English spaces: the 1857 Round Reading Room designed by Sydney Smirke, with its shallow dome, surrounded by a two-acre internal court. To demolish this masterpiece would have been unthinkable. It had to be preserved, and Foster's scheme for so doing entailed sweeping away the clutter of now obsolete bookstack buildings from around it and covering the court with a light glass-and-steel roof, thus creating...
...Foster's genius--the word is hardly too strong--is most apparent in his structural thought. He has often been called a high-tech architect, but actually, despite the complexity of some of his designs, the buildings don't brandish their technological language as gee-whiz metaphor; they use it as an essential tool of spatial effects and structural needs, always seeking the most elegant and succinct solution. "The idea of high-tech is a bit misleading," Foster says. "Since Stonehenge, architects have always been at the cutting edge of technology. And you can't separate technology from the humanistic...
Ever since his student years at Manchester University in the 1950s (a working-class boy, he paid his way through school with a variety of jobs, including a stint as a nightclub bouncer), Foster loved utilitarian buildings: barns, factories, windmills. He did measured drawings of them when other students were drawing buildings they had never seen: Greek temples, Palladian villas. Foster would learn from those too, but his immersion in common language and use translates into a feeling of rightness, which works as completely in small structures as in large. A fine example of the former is the entrances...
...buildings is a feeling for hangar-like lightness, strength and frugality of consumption that came out brilliantly in such projects as his 1981 design for the airport at Stansted in England. Earlier airports had massive concentrations of ductwork above their ceilings for air conditioning, lighting and electrical services; Foster rethought this completely and realized huge savings in structural mass and energy consumption could be made by shifting the utilities underground, leaving a floating roof and walls that could open to natural daylight. This changed architects' thinking about airport design worldwide, and every major airport built since--Hamburg, Stuttgart, Kuala Lumpur...