Alumni News Review of Norman Foster at the Centre Pompidou
The Norman Foster exhibition, on view at the Centre Pompidou from May 10 to August 7, 2023, was the largest ever dedicated to one of the most prolific architects of our time. Curated by Frédéric Migayrou, designed by Sir Norman Foster (MArch ’62), and organized in collaboration with Foster + Partners and the Norman Foster Foundation, the exhibition covered nearly 2,200 square meters of the top-floor galleries, overlooking the skyline of Paris. Some 500 drawings, 300 notebooks, and 130 models were displayed along with artwork by Umberto Boccioni, Constantin Brancusi, Fernand Leger, and Ai Weiwei, as well as various design objects including planes and cars, that inspired Foster throughout his career, many of them from his private collection. The exhibition also featured a wall of names of people who contributed to the projects on display, 10,000 in all, including many YSoA graduates who worked in his office over the years. Yet mostly the exhibition conveyed the vision of a singular globetrotting architect who resides in the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Spain, and the United States and counts some of the world’s largest corporations, most powerful individuals, and wealthiest nations as his clients. Foster founded the Team 4 office in 1963, exactly 60 years ago, with his first wife, Wendy Cheesman, and Richard Rogers (MArch ’62), and subsequently Foster and Associates in 1967, which became Foster + Partners ten years later. Yet in his
introductory text Foster makes it clear that the founding principal is by no means ready to call it quits, underlining that the exhibition, despite covering projects from the very beginning of his practice, should be read as a “futurospective” rather than a retrospective. By emphasizing his lifelong interest in sustainability, Foster gives the exhibition a certain Nietzschean twist, justifying retrospective reflection because it’s been done presumably for the benefit of today’s environmental crisis. The show’s overall tone was utopian and hopeful: It posited that architecture can help solve current environmental problems with the aid of new technologies and that architects should learn from the past while moving steadfastly toward the future. Buckminster Fuller, with whom Foster collaborated in the 1970s, served as a guiding star, and the unbuilt lunar habitations Foster + Partners designed recently for the European Space Agency bear an unescapable resemblance to the old Bucky domes. The idea that one could move to the Moon to experience the good old hippie vibe brings together space and time travel and prompts the question: How can historical reflection help us move forward? Similarly the installation aimed to make past and current works jell into one seamless oeuvre. The first room, displaying sketches, architectural drawings, and travel photos, traced the evolution of Foster’s practice year by year in chronological order. In the second, and largest, part of exhibition — housing large-scale models that were custom built for the exhibition — the visitor was invited to leave the past behind. Gone is the archival aura and chronological ordering of the drawing gallery. Gleaming of newness, the models were organized around seven themes: Nature and Urbanity, Vertical City, Skin and Bones, History and Tradition, Planning and Place, and Networks and Mobility. A final, separate room dedicated to Futures included proposals for extraterrestrial habitation and space travel. While the archival drawings were housed in a black box to protect them from daylight, the room displaying models opened up to the Parisian skyline in a spectacular manner. Along the window were placed a row of skyscrapers, including the iconic Hongkong Shanghai Bank Corporation headquarters (1989): the Hearst Tower (2006), in Manhattan, which dwarfs the Art Deco building below; and the cone-shaped Swiss Re headquarters (2004), in London. Their placement against the city that Walter Benjamin dubbed the “Capital of the Nineteenth Century” made it clear that new
1960s Alexander Tzonis (MArch ’63) curated the photographic exhibition Shacks: Catastrophe and Creation (Παράγκες: Καταστροφή και δημιουργία) at the Canadian Institute in Greece (June 22–July 12, 2023). The show chronicles the dwellings built along the Ilissos River in Athens by refugees from Asia Minor. Tzonis documented these makeshift structures in photos and watercolors when he was a teen.
1970s The Louis Armstrong House Museum, designed by Caples Jefferson Architects, a firm led by Sara Caples (MArch ’74) and Everardo Jefferson (MArch ’73), opened on July 6. Located in Corona, Queens, it includes a home for the jazz musician’s archive, a 75-seat performance space, and exhibits, all within a two-story building that matches the scale of the surrounding neighborhood. cities are being built increasingly in Asia and the Middle East — and if Foster and his fellow techno-utopists prevail, soon on other planets. Virgin Galactic’s Spaceport America, completed in 2014, is ready to receive those who believe the future lies beyond the planet Earth. Masdar City (2013), in Abu Dhabi, and Apple Park (2017), housing 12,000 employees on a 75-hectare campus in Cupertino, California, could as well have been built on the Moon. Considering the scale of many of the recent projects, like the two-mile-long terminal at Beijing Capital International Airport (2008), I was at first surprised to find one of the firm’s smallest projects, the Ombrière au Vieux-Port, in Marseille (2013), chosen for the large banner hung on the Centre Pompidou main facade to welcome visitors to the show. Part of a master plan to reconfigure Marseille’s old port, it consists of a 151-by-72-foot canopy made of reflective stainless steel to protect pedestrians from rain and sun while mirroring them upside down. Yet in retrospect I have come to the conclusion that the project summarizes Foster’s ambition and talent in a spectacular manner. One must indeed applaud his ability to calibrate architecture to house and channel large populations of people without compromising human scale and technical perfection. Furthermore, the trompe l’œil factor of the project reveals that as far as the old maestro is concerned architecture’s main function is not simply to reflect existing realities but to amplify them into new dimensions. — Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen (MED ’94), assistant dean and professor
Andrés M. Duany (MArch ’74) and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk (MArch ’74) were awarded honorary doctorate degrees at Yale’s 322nd commencement ceremony, on May 22, in recognition of their decades of leadership in architecture and city planning. Duany and Plater-Zyberk are best known for leading the Congress for the New Urbanism, an influential city-planning movement focused on placemaking and alternatives to suburban sprawl. Based in Miami, Duany and PlaterZyberk cofounded the firms Arquitectonica and, later, DPZ CoDesign. Plater-Zyberk was dean of the University of Miami School of Architecture from 1995 to 2013. Jala Makhzoumi (MED ’75) delivered a keynote lecture at the 2023 New Zealand Institute of Landscape Architects Firth Conference, in Whakatū Nelson. Louise Braverman (MArch ’77) delivered the lecture “Architecture of Art + Conscience” on March 9, 2023, at the National Arts Club in New York, on configuring our material world to create ethical built environments.
1980s Michael Kostow (MArch ’81) was recently featured in Interior Design magazine with a career-spanning interview touching on his 35 years as a professional architect. He discusses projects that set the standard for preservation as well as workplace and Broadway theater upgrades. He also discusses how being a jazz musician might make him a better architect. A recent project was the $47 million restoration and expansion of the Cort Theatre on Broadway, which was officially renamed the James Earl Jones Theatre in honor of the iconic award-winning actor. The Shubert Organization, a client over many years and projects, engaged Kostow Greenwood Architects to design and build a new contemporary annex to expand accessibility, increase public space, add dressing rooms and rehearsal spaces, and enhance the beauty of the 110-year-old theater. Recent award recognition for the Annex includes being named a finalist in the NYCxDESIGN Awards and a Special Mention honoree in the Architizer A+Awards. Brent Sherwood (BA ’80, MArch ’83) leads the development of space architecture for Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’s space company. As senior vice president of Space Systems Development for the past four years, he grew a 50-person, $30 million operation into an 1,100-person, $1 billion enterprise that created new business units for Lunar Transportation (which won a $3.4 billion contract from NASA) and for Space Mobility. The team is developing Orbital Reef, a commercially owned and operated space station for research and tourism.
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