Norman Foster: Works 1

Edited by David Jenkins. London, New York: Prestel Publishing, 2003.

This important volume is, as the publisher Prestel says, 'the keystone of a major project'. In fact it is the first instalment of a multi-volume and comprehensive documentation of Foster’s oeuvre, no less. Foster has been fortunate, and astute, to secure David Jenkins, one of the foremost architectural editors of this generation.

The unveiling of the tower at 30 St Mary Axe designed by Foster and Partners reveals a breathtaking summation of all Foster’s skills, located for Swiss Re on a prime site and a new landmark in the city. It is uniquely a skyscraper structure of a new genre, a 180 m high 40-storey tower. No other European firm of architects could have pulled off such a virtuoso turn. The building incorporates revolutionary touches in terms of building technology in this new cosmic world, skyscraper and no longer point block, creates a new typology. This is a case in point, and one might look at this first before returning to the book. The novel tapering of this building at the base successfully addresses the city context and scale, while a return to the integration of upper-level planting emerges via just such green 'lungs' - nothing about the entire design contains any of the normal resort to gimmickry to be found in the central urban 'signature' building. Foster's spiral twists of enclosed greenery reconcile gardens on an urban scale. The actual lens device which surmounts the whole seems equally natural.

Sources for the form overall are apparently derived from the fir-cone, and (as Charles Jencks has astutely observed) acknowledge in cosmogenesis Sir Christopher Wren's 'pineapple', which surmounts St Paul’s Cathedral. There are many ingenious devices: air movements are subtly channelled around the spiral form, to create the minimum inconvenience to the pedestrians who throng the narrow City streets below. At actual street level, Foster has provided an open-scaled space at two storeys as a legitimate and wholly organic urban intervention. Overall, in the cityscape, the prominent and wholly original form of the tower provides a challenging typological direction-finder for all future urban towers. But few if any will match it.

So the tower at St Mary Axe now endorses the superb first volume of Norman Foster: Works 1. The first beginnings of the fledgling Foster team are followed by David Jenkins through from the 1960s to the 1980s. As befits the documentation, the quality of design of the publication is exemplary, and in particular Foster’s own sketches are excellently incorporated. A remarkable saga which reveals the inside story of how the Foster team by constantly pushing forward the technical boundaries of architectural practice, set up a continuous series of markers along the route for others to follow. Key observers and critics are enlisted along the way to clarify Foster’s innovations/ Robert Stern, John Walker, Alastair Best, and Reyner Banham are joined by Chris Abel, Peter Buchanan, Francis Duffy and others, each pursuing an individual yet contiguous angle of perception about Foster. The evolution, steady and progressively documented, of Foster’s work grows logically and is honestly exposed. Foster has expressed a firmly based admiration for the work of Alvar Aalto, and yet Aalto in his own oeuvre complete was less than comprehensive in the degree to which he edited out projects which at the time seemed not to fit the sequence. Foster includes it all, to hang out confidently to the winds of historical analysis. We must now look forward to the second volume in which the story continues as before in David Jenkins' capable editorial grasp. To know of the genesis of Foster's ideas with Buckminster Fuller, Jean Prouve, and of the shared initial experimentation with Richard Rogers, and to see documented the growing team membership (including those who spiralled off like Michael Hopkins) is to know half the story: to be aware, among numerous admitted influences, of the role of Alvar Aalto as an inspiration is to recognise the real depth in late 20th century Modernism, of Foster's enterprise.

Editor.