Word: fosters
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...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...
...would reapply the lesson himself 11 years later in his $20 billion design for the world's largest airport, at Chek Lap Kok in Hong Kong--the last megastructure spawned by the floundering "tiger economies" of Asia. Foster envisaged it as a "horizontal cathedral," with its airy, Y-shaped passenger terminal under the great wing of its roof. It had teething troubles at first--there were cargo and passenger delays when it opened last July--but now, according to Wan Wai Lun, corporate affairs officer of the Hong Kong Airport Authority, "it's incredibly efficient and caters to the passengers...
...ideal of humane efficiency, understood as social responsibility, undergirds all of Foster's work. No living architect has thought more closely about the ecological effects of his buildings. In his brilliant 1991 design for Frankfurt's Commerzbank, the tallest office building in Europe, he brought off the seemingly impossible feat of building a supertower that could use natural ventilation (as against fuel-gobbling air conditioning) during 60% of the year. "Anything that reduces energy consumption and cuts down on greenhouse gases is good news," he says. In his redesign of the Reichstag, the seat of German government in Berlin, Foster...