Love Triangle

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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.