Love Triangle

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.