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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
August 28, 2005
Foster & Partners
Not all platitudes are equal, and while reading an essay just now by Sir Norman Foster, on how he manages his huge architectural practice, from its head office in London to temporary project offices all over the world, I was delighted to meet up again with one of my favourites: "Even small steps in the right direction are better than none at all." As Confucius say (or probably, didn't say, but the correct attribution of quotes is just a modern mania), "A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step." It is something never to be forgotten in politics: the reason I am prepared to be generous to a politician of any party who will take the tiniest steps, if they be in the right direction. These always require courage, and even a little courage is better than none. It is also why I condemn without restriction any kind of utopianism at the first clear whiff. Alas, our political class today, especially in Canada, consists almost entirely of persons whose visionary utopianism is concealed only by the mediocrity of their minds. But Sir Norman is remarkable for the skill with which he evades political questions, and works cheerfully with clients who range from the self-important owners of small yachts, to the bean-counting directors of insurance corporations, to the unspeakable tyrants who govern Kazakhstan and China -- all the while muttering further platitudes about democracy, ecology, sustainability, and so forth, like a latter-day Buckminster Fuller. I have never understood what to think of his work, beyond a natural propensity to be thrilled by it. Both the thrill, and my reservations about what his buildings teach, have come to a head in the recent completion of the Swiss Re Headquarters, in London, whose radial plan, circular perimeter, and tapering profile rises to dominate the skyline of the old City, like an immense, spiralling, engorged lingam, completely displacing St. Paul's Cathedral at the centre of the postcard. I prefer the building to the place it was put. The displacement is effected not just by its size, but by the shock of its shape. And without endorsing the borborygmically middle-class architectural traditionalism of Prince Charles, I note that our megaproject architects continue to observe the formal rules of modesty in adapting buildings to existing sightlines, without for a moment embracing the spirit of them. The problem being, at source, that the great building projects today -- including grand institutional ones such as the many extravagant museum projects around the world -- are invariably secular. Our cities are dominated by banks, and bureaucracies, not cathedrals, as befits an age not of unrestricted capitalism, but of unrestricted materialism, and spiritual vacuity. Yet the Swiss Re building itself is utterly coherent, as all great architecture, and from what I can see, does indeed make broad economic sense. Its achievements in humane wind deflection, and in the exploitation of external pressure differentials to drive a system of natural ventilation, are genuinely impressive. As infrastructure, it is claimed the building costs half to operate what a conventional rectilinear building would cost, and the claim is plausible without looking at the accounts. Much of this is in fact achieved, however, not by the flashy externals, but by the clichéd device of removing internal partitions, thus merging offices together on the open plan. This, as ever since the 1960s, on the siren call of "creating democracy". In Sir Norman's own offices, the many hundred staff are seated with strict equality in seemingly endless ranks of long, high-tech workbenches. This does not, to my mind, enforce democracy so much as remind me of Pharaoh and his galleys. To what extent are these buildings original, or is any human creation original? I am struck, looking through the newly-published Foster & Partners Catalogue, by the similarity in creative engineering solutions, between Sir Norman and e.g. my adored Santiago Calatrava, the ingenious Spanish engineer and designer who does a better job of conveying lightness, visually, and of realizing the "full potential of the math". Nature itself has suggested and imposed the shapes, and the architects are answering this call of nature, independently arriving at the same "discoveries" at about the same moment (as so often in the past). They are, for all their genius, and very good intentions, more engineers than architects, more rhetorical than musical, and the spirit of our age leads them away from the hearth towards the grand, the fearful, the utopian, the Pyramids. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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