Go, Modernity

Hal Foster

  • Catalogue: Foster and Partners edited by David Jenkins
    Prestel, 316 pp, £22.99, July 2005, ISBN 3 7913 3298 8
  • Norman Foster: Works 2 edited by David Jenkins
    Prestel, 548 pp, £60.00, January 2006, ISBN 3 7913 3017 9

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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