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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.
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