Love Triangle

By Richard Lacayo

If you like turmoil, architecture is the place to be right now. The last time the field had something like a prevailing style was in the 1970s, at what appeared to be the tail end of Modernism. It was a moment when everybody knew the formula for a successful building--Glass+Steel=Box--and everybody was sick of it.

We live now in a creative free-for-all, when Deconstruction, Expressionism and a half a dozen other unorthodoxies reign. But as it turns out, Modernism never actually died. What it did was evolve--sometimes into something really interesting. To see what that means right now just stand at the corner of Eighth Avenue and 57th Street in New York City and run your eyes up and down the shimmying silhouette of the Hearst Tower, a new office building by the British architect Norman Foster. What you'll be looking at may be the most gratifying specimen of Modernist invention since Foster's "gherkin," the torpedo-shaped office building he dropped on London two years ago. Or maybe since his transparent dome for the Reichstag in Berlin. Or his serene and lucid courtyard for the British Museum. You get the picture.

Foster's tower, his first sizable project in the U.S., rises from within a six-story brown masonry base that dates from the 1920s. That's when news paper baron William Randolph Hearst commissioned the architect and stage designer Joseph Urban to produce a low-rise headquarters for Hearst's growing empire. The intention was that a taller addition would be constructed later, but the Depression intervened. For nearly eight decades, the Deco-flavored base stood alone. In the late 1990s the Hearst Corp. decided to keep the old building but to hollow it out and erect a new tower within and above it.

For that the Hearst people went to Lord Foster--the peerage came in 1999--for years the man Asian banking executives and Arab sheiks have pursued for the luster of Big Architecture. When you visit his firm's vast London offices you understand what it must have been like to await an audience with the doge in 16th century Venice. Clients and would-be clients from around the world crisscross the reception area clutching their portfolios and chattering in Italian and Russian. The British press says his profits have been in decline. He even lost a commission last year to a firm established by a onetime Foster architect, Ken Shuttleworth, who reportedly left because of a dispute with Foster about sharing credit for the gherkin, which is known more formally as the Swiss Re headquarters. But Foster's immense operation--he employs 534 people--is still thriving. It has projects under way in 22 nations, including a substantial addition to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, a pyramidal office tower in Moscow City and a huge airport for Beijing.

So when the Hearst people chose Foster, they knew they were getting an international star. Still, they might not have suspected he would give them the best building to appear in New York City in years. (It may also be a first sign of new hope for the city's beleaguered skyline, overbuilt with middling boxes. Major additions are now promised or under way from a long list of architects of Foster's caliber, including Frank Gehry, Fumihiko Maki, Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers.) What Foster has created is a 46-story notched glass tower covered with a webwork of triangles, called a diagrid, in off-white stainless steel. That serpentine frame is both structural--it supports most of the building's weight--and delightful. It makes of the whole exterior a cage where sunlight plays all day. In the morning the light slaloms up and down the bright diagonals. At twilight those same lines glow. And because the diagrid divides the building into four-story segments, it provides a human scale that an unbroken glass-curtain wall would not. Who cares that it tiptoes right up to the edge of gaudy? Given the mediocrity of so much that has been crammed into the Manhattan skyline over the past 25 years, you could do worse than risk a bit of glitter to arrive at real jubilation.

The Hearst Tower proves again that Foster, 70, can orchestrate a very canny combination of the cerebral anonymity of high tech and the personal flourishes of the artiste. While you might not call his mostly heavyset structures lyrical, the best of them are vivid without being contrived, which means that even their most idiosyncratic twists and turns can be traced to some engineering or environmental requirement. So the stainless-steel diagrid of the Hearst Tower is not just jazzy but also purposeful. Triangles are more stable than rectangles. "A triangular structure has more 'load paths,'" Foster explains, using the engineer's term for the lines along which a framework carries a building's weight. "So if you take away some of that structure, the loads redistribute themselves." That's another way of saying that if a terrorist truck bomb were to blow away part of the lower floors, the exterior diagrid would--it is hoped--still hug the upper floors tightly.

When it first got under way, early in the 20th century, Modernism was an idealistic undertaking. Clean lines and glass-curtain walls were supposed to bring on a more just, more rational world. After World War II, the style drifted from its utopian foundations and was adopted wholesale for corporate headquarters everywhere. But Foster has kept his connection to Modernism's idealistic strain. His designs are environmentally conscious. His new library at Berlin's Free University is the last word in energy efficiency. And the diagrids of the Hearst Tower use 20% less steel than a conventional frame does. His office buildings also configure space in new ways that give workers more access to light, air and one another. He wants to prove that skyscrapers can be good citizens, not just municipal thugs that hang around on street corners and steal sunlight and energy from the city.

Keep all that in mind when you step into the tour de force just inside the Hearst Tower. Instead of a conventional lobby, Foster has produced a massive indoor piazza, a 10-story atrium bathed in sunlight from overhead skylights and surrounded by the windowed masonry walls of Urban's original base, which give the appearance of exterior walls facing inward. At a time when cities have ever less interest in parks or open space, this is an office tower with a town square inside, not a shopping mall. "A building should try to give something back to the city in terms of public space," Foster says. Like most other architects, he believes that whether we like it or not, density is the future. That's not a bad thing, he hastens to add, so long as sufficient open space is provided within new buildings. He likes to remind people that the wealthiest, most sought-after parts of London are the most crowded. "Kensington, Belgravia, Mayfair are four or five times the density of the poorer boroughs," he says.

Foster also has a 65-story office tower planned for the World Trade Center site, not far from where the Freedom Tower is set to rise. His design for that project is still a work in progress. But the prospect that the good Lord might do something at that contested site is welcome news. It means that at least one tall building there may be worth looking up to.