Exhibit review: The Art of Architecture: Foster + Partners at Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas

by Joan Arbery of Renegade Bus

Walking into the Nasher Sculpture Center’s The Art of Architecture: Foster + Partners, running through January 10, 2010, it’s as if rocket ships are blasting into space. The walls of the Nasher, draped in large reproductions of the interior spaces of Foster’s buildings, make Foster’s works seem air-born. Foster often uses glass and steel to reshape stone, and the glass that tops off his buildings is seconded by the glass ceiling of the Nasher and its own creamy Travertine marble walls. The whole building seems to triumph in glassy ascent.

Within two main galleries of the Nasher can be found various models of Foster’s work over the past forty years. From suspension bridges that span whole plateaus to the banks of the River Thames, from skyscrapers to piazzas, Foster’s work alters the shape of things. His frames for these works seem like bare bones themselves, while the skins of his buildings, as seen in their models, are like exoskeletons and ectoplasms, either vertebral or amoebic.

The Spaceport in New Mexico, begun in 2007 as a station for tourist space travel, seems a natural outgrowth of this take-off effect in Foster’s work. Not only does the Spaceport work as a portal towards space, a bird’s eye view of it shows a building that looks like a manta-ray or the face of an alien that’d come crawling towards you in Independence Day.

Meanwhile, London’s Gherkin, also known as the Swiss RE, resembles a rocket ship with its aerodynamic paneling and its tapering top. Likewise, from above, Beijing International Airport has the shape of something like a torpedo or a missile. In this aeronautic vein, the Winspear seems a kind of honeycomb configuration with the red drum as the queen bee or the mother ship. Inside the Winspear, the chandelier retracted into the ceiling gives off a twinkling of numerous lights, as if the constellations themselves star in the operatic skies.

The Sage Gateshead building, by contrast, has taken on the shape of something ovine. Its exterior could be some kind of undulating sheepskin—all that’s missing are the head and tail. Equally, the Sage could be a snail or conch shell. Like the waves of music that cascade within it, the building’s shape reflects sound waves in its concentric design.

Foster’s forms are seemingly simplistic as they suture gaps in open space (Trafalgar Square, Millau Bridge) or within a built environment (the British Museum, Reichstag). But once these structures and reformulations are in place, they transform the fabric of place. Foster’s art is the warp and weave of glass—making the durable seem plastic and the frangible solid.

Whatever the shape of Foster’s buildings, they seem to revel in the multiple reflections and reverberations the sky and wind enact overhead. As Foster himself notes, he tries to make his buildings breathe. With The Art of Architecture: Foster + Partners, such inhaling and exhaling occurs. Each model points at the fluidity, breadth, and exactingness of his work, showing how the skeletons and skins of buildings are integral bodies in the body politic. We breathe through and in buildings, and so they too should sigh, echo, and laugh.