Word: fostering
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...when the Hearst people chose Foster, they knew they were getting an international star. Still, they might not have suspected he would give them the best building to appear in New York City in years. (It may also be a first sign of new hope for the city's beleaguered skyline, overbuilt with middling boxes. Major additions are now promised or under way from a long list of architects of Foster's caliber, including Frank Gehry, Fumihiko Maki, Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers.) What Foster has created is a 46-story notched glass tower covered with a webwork of triangles...
...Hearst Tower proves again that Foster, 70, can orchestrate a very canny combination of the cerebral anonymity of high tech and the personal flourishes of the artiste. While you might not call his mostly heavyset structures lyrical, the best of them are vivid without being contrived, which means that even their most idiosyncratic twists and turns can be traced to some engineering or environmental requirement. So the stainless-steel diagrid of the Hearst Tower is not just jazzy but also purposeful. Triangles are more stable than rectangles. "A triangular structure has more 'load paths,'" Foster explains, using the engineer...
...under way, early in the 20th century, Modernism was an idealistic undertaking. Clean lines and glass-curtain walls were supposed to bring on a more just, more rational world. After World War II, the style drifted from its utopian foundations and was adopted wholesale for corporate headquarters everywhere. But Foster has kept his connection to Modernism's idealistic strain. His designs are environmentally conscious. His new library at Berlin's Free University is the last word in energy efficiency. And the diagrids of the Hearst Tower use 20% less steel than a conventional frame does. His office buildings also configure...
Keep all that in mind when you step into the tour de force just inside the Hearst Tower. Instead of a conventional lobby, Foster has produced a massive indoor piazza, a 10-story atrium bathed in sunlight from overhead skylights and surrounded by the windowed masonry walls of Urban's original base, which give the appearance of exterior walls facing inward. At a time when cities have ever less interest in parks or open space, this is an office tower with a town square inside, not a shopping mall. "A building should try to give something back to the city...
...Foster also has a 65-story office tower planned for the World Trade Center site, not far from where the Freedom Tower is set to rise. His design for that project is still a work in progress. But the prospect that the good Lord might do something at that contested site is welcome news. It means that at least one tall building there may be worth looking...