The Fosterification of London continues apace. It has become almost commonplace to say that no architect has so dominated the capital since Sir Christopher Wren with St Paul's or Colonel Richard Seifert with Centre Point. This raises one obvious question: why? And beyond that, what does it mean? In a country that has famously been associated with conservatism and conservation, what does it say about Londoners that they now seem to be favouring the glassy, airy charms of Foster over the brawny, bulky, tweedy architecture of English compromise? Norman Foster (now Lord Foster of Thameside) has never been a political figure in the manner of his friend, rival and former partner Richard Rogers (Lord Rogers of Riverside).
Yet he has been able to realise his vision on a scale that falls to very few in his profession. Foster has usurped the territory of the big commercial players, those firms of architects who since the mid-1950s have modelled themselves on American firms such as SOM (Skidmore, Owings, Merrill) who made architecture into a slick and highly profitable business. SOM took architects away from pipes and bow ties and into the world of natty suits, fast-track construction, accountants, lawyers and public relations. It was SOM and the firms that aped it across the world that have been responsible in great measure for the way, better or worse, our city centres have looked over the past 40 years. At best they have produced office towers of great sophistication, the equivalent of Abstract Expressionist canvases; on a normal day (don't even think about a bad one) they have invaded our cities with slick, gimcrack office blocks that have been designed first and foremost as machines for making money in and with the good grace and manners of the Krays and the Richardsons.
This left the "art" architects out in the cold, or when there was money available in the public sector (something you will have to explain to your children one day when they ask what was the public sector) designing agreeable buildings such as universities, libraries, hospitals and local authority housing (another one to explain to the children). What Foster has done, and where a part of his considerable genius lies, is reconcile the role of the commercial and the "art" architect. His buildings flatter the sensibilities of both business leaders and the sort of people for whom a day spent in a museum is worth more than all the sums added up in all the computer ledgers in the City of London. But Foster knows well that in 1999 those museums are very likely to be funded to a large extent by the business corporations he flatters with his fluent, sassy buildings.
In other words, Foster has found an architectural path that brings together the needs of both art and commerce. His 500-strong international practice, Foster & Partners, has the technical ability, the financial skills and the sense of timing which are inherent in top American firms, and the artistry and imagination of the most innovative architects and engineers of the past half century. It is a remarkable and rare achievement and needs to be pointed out if we are to understand why Foster has such a command of our urban landscape at the end of the 20th century.
IT is also important to recognise his appeal to the Blair government, which, although it has a very long way to go in helping to steer the architectural and building world along a path that will encourage the best of design in our cities, wants to present the kind of dynamic, modern worldview that Foster has done since he began work more than 35 years ago. Foster's is the architecture of New Britain as New Labour dreams of it, although it is important to stress that the government has picked up on Foster's vision rather than the other way round.
And yet this star-man has come down to earth very successfully. If you seek his monuments, take a trip along the Thames from Battersea to Canary Wharf: you'll find them, and these are only the buildings nearing completion and not the ones that already exist. Starting at Foster's office overlooking the Albert Bridge at Battersea, we have some time to relax before chugging through the old City centre. As the boat passes the South Bank, you'll pass (though not see: it's a mile or so away) the great green dome of the British Museum on your left-hand side. The Great Court here that Foster is shaping will be a major new public meeting place, a kind of glazed forum as well as the hub of the museum itself. It's a huge project and opens one of the better acts of the Lottery Follies being played out by architects on behalf of the strange and secretive Millennium Commission next year.
Coming up dead ahead between Blackfriars and Southwark bridges is the Millennium Bridge, a graceful arc across the river that will take pedestrians from the City of London to Southwark and, specifically, from St Paul's Cathedral to the Tate Gallery of Modern Art (converted from the former Bankside power station by the Swiss architects Herzog & De Meuron). It has been designed in collaboration with Sir Anthony Caro, the sculptor, and Chris Wise, an engineer with Ove Arup & Partners. It opens with the Tate next May. On our right, shortly after the bridge, is the site of the long-awaited headquarters of the new Greater London Authority (GLA), the glass eye from which the first elected mayor of London will look at the capital and decide what to do about the traffic and a public realm that has all but fallen apart in an age of deregulation and privatisation. Foster has been chosen to represent a new epoch in London's history: his design suggests openness, democracy and energy. We just have to hope that the GLA will live up to these ideals.
Beyond Tower Bridge we reach Thatcher Towers, aka Canary Wharf, that extraordinary concatenation of sub-Chicago architecture. Here Foster is adding not just a new 17storey headquarters for Citibank, and a 200m-high glass tower for the Hong Kong & Shanghai Banking Corporation (whose headquarters in Hong Kong he designed to universal acclaim between 1979 and 1986) but the means to reach them: Canary Wharf Underground station, one of the cathedrallike public buildings realised by the Jubilee line's project manager, the architect Roland Paoletti. Stop here and contemplate: we may never see public architecture of this ambition and calibre in private, pirate New Britain again. It is fascinating to see Foster at Canary Wharf creating space for public service that is equal and possibly superior to that he is shaping for the business community.
One more bend in the Thames and we come to land beside the Dome on the apex of the North Greenwich peninsula. The vast wave-like transport interchange building that will serve the dome by way of Underground, bus and taxi is yet another Foster project. On our way back to civilisation down river, as we watch a wonderful panorama of the City of London hove into view, I haven't forgotten the vertiginous steel-and-glass spiral Foster is designing for the Swiss Reinsurance Company that will rise above the old Baltic Exchange site.
This has been called a gherkin, but owes nothing to the pickled state of much of the homespun architecture that the City, among other commissioning bodies, is struggling to come to terms with. It is, rather, a way at looking at the city office tower as fresh as SOM's designs were in New York and Chicago, 40 or more years ago. Foster may indeed be over-producing, yet until fellow architects find alternative or parallel ways to express art in commerce, and commerce in the art spirit of our age, his sheer professionalism will keep them wandering, jealously, in the wings.
