Word: hearstly
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...Modernism never actually died. What it did was evolve--sometimes into something really interesting. To see what that means right now just stand at the corner of Eighth Avenue and 57th Street in New York City and run your eyes up and down the shimmying silhouette of the Hearst Tower, a new office building by the British architect Norman Foster. What you'll be looking at may be the most gratifying specimen of Modernist invention since Foster's "gherkin," the torpedo-shaped office building he dropped on London two years ago. Or maybe since his transparent dome for the Reichstag...
Foster's tower, his first sizable project in the U.S., rises from within a six-story brown masonry base that dates from the 1920s. That's when news paper baron William Randolph Hearst commissioned the architect and stage designer Joseph Urban to produce a low-rise headquarters for Hearst's growing empire. The intention was that a taller addition would be constructed later, but the Depression intervened. For nearly eight decades, the Deco-flavored base stood alone. In the late 1990s the Hearst Corp. decided to keep the old building but to hollow it out and erect a new tower...
...that the Hearst people went to Lord Foster--the peerage came in 1999--for years the man Asian banking executives and Arab sheiks have pursued for the luster of Big Architecture. When you visit his firm's vast London offices you understand what it must have been like to await an audience with the doge in 16th century Venice. Clients and would-be clients from around the world crisscross the reception area clutching their portfolios and chattering in Italian and Russian. The British press says his profits have been in decline. He even lost a commission last year...
...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...