Go, Modernity 
Hal Foster
Has any other contemporary designer ‘signed’ as many cityscapes as Norman Foster? Perhaps no architect since Christopher Wren has affected the London skyline so dramatically, from the Swiss Re ‘gherkin’ to the new Wembley Stadium arch. Foster has a right to be immodest, and the Catalogue of his work is punctuated with adjectives like ‘first’ and ‘largest’, and verbs like ‘reinvent’ and ‘redefine’. Yet the multi-volume Works (there will be six books in all) borders on overkill, as if Foster wanted to outdo the tomes produced for more notorious peers such as Frank Gehry and Rem Koolhaas, whose offices seem like cottage industries in comparison with his.
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Hal Foster chairs the department of art and archaeology at Princeton.
Other articles by this contributor:
At the Guggenheim · Russian Art
In Venice · Hal Foster at the Biennale
In Central Park · The Gates
Why all the hoopla? · Frank Gehry
Slumming with Rappers at the Roxy · Nobrow: The Culture of Marketing, the Marketing of Cultre by John Seabrook
At Dia:Beacon · Hal Foster at Dia:Beacon
Bigness · Rem Koolhaas
At the Hayward · ‘The Painting of Modern Life’
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