Word: towers
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...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...
...sharing credit for the gherkin, which is known more formally as the Swiss Re headquarters. But Foster's immense operation--he employs 534 people--is still thriving. It has projects under way in 22 nations, including a substantial addition to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, a pyramidal office tower in Moscow City and a huge airport for Beijing...
...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, called a diagrid, in off-white stainless steel. That serpentine frame is both structural--it supports most of the building's weight--and delightful. It makes of the whole exterior a cage where sunlight plays all day. In the morning the light slaloms...
...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...
...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 space in new ways that give workers more access to light, air and one another. He wants to prove that skyscrapers can be good citizens, not just municipal thugs that hang around on street corners...