Read full article via davidgalbraith.org.
Foster simultaneously grew one of the largest architecture practices in the world while still winning awards for design excellence. The secret was to design buildings like the limited edition, invite only Porsches that Foster drove and fellow Porsche drivers would commission them.
[ Fosters made buildings and Apple made computers like Porsche made cars ]
Jobs went further, however, he managed to create products that were designed like Porsches and made them available to everyone, via High Tech that transcended stylistic elements. An Apple product really was high technology and its form followed function, it went beyond the Porsche analogy by being truly fit for purpose in a way that a Porsche couldn’t, being a car designed for a speed that you weren’t allowed to drive. Silicon Valley capitalism had arguably delivered what the Soviets had dreamed of and failed, modernism for the masses. An iPhone really is the best phone you can buy at any price. To paraphrase Andy Warhol: Lady Gaga uses an iPhone, and just think, you can have an iPhone too. An iPhone is an iPhone and no amount of money can get you a better phone. This was what American modernism was about.
[ An iPhone is an iPhone and no amount of money can get you a better phone ]
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Foster is at his best creating buildings that exist as perfect diagrams, the Sainsbury center is a bubble chamber, a U-shaped tunnel with an oblique entry and a spiral, the Reichstag is an inversion of oppressive classicism, an open fishbowl for a new democracy and Stanstead is an attempt to put all the crap in an airport out of sight to create an airport that contains mostly air. The less good buildings, such as the Gherkin which are part of the Dubai influenced trend of funny shaped towers with rather ordinary floor plans weren’t really designed by him (Ken Shuttleworth was primarily responsible for the Gherkin), and as he moved to Nyon a few minutes away from where I live, near Geneva, perhaps Foster is no longer as involved in the London based firm’s designs. But I hope that with the Apple campus he is, it’s a perfect diagram, a squashed glass Apple the size of a town and with a layout like Burning Man. Unlike the Gherkin and despite what people say for the benefit of planners (it’s a giant spaceship) the shape isn’t that unusual or important, but its simple enough to allow for the attention to detail, in beautiful, giant curved glass swathes, that epitomizes Apple.
[ A squashed glass Apple the size of a town and with a layout like Burning Man ]
It would be a fitting cap to an illustrious career and the achievement of a long term goal that Fosters never quite pulled off (even if you include the Hearst Tower in NY) to re-import his quintessentially American style from Europe, repeating what Jonathan Ive did for product design under Jobs, and to produce something that becomes an American cultural landmark, something which Silicon Valley lacks.
