Norman Foster at the NZ Film Festival

This past Sunday morning I attended a screening of “How much does your building weigh, Mr. Foster?”

It is one of the films kicking off the Auckland leg of the New Zealand International Film Festival and is written by Deyan Sudjic, who also recently published a biography of Norman Foster. The film is a modern fairy tale of sorts. It follows Foster from his humble beginnings in a working-class row house in Manchester to international renown as one of the eminent architects of the past few decades.

A few impressions:

• Many of the scenes are just superb, especially of the Millau viaduct at the beginning of the film.
• It is filled with polite commentary and anecdotes from his contemporaries, with Foster himself sharing insights into his life - both funny and tragic.
• It did not make me like certain projects any more than I did before. I still think the Hearst Tower in NYC is insensitively placed on top of Josef Urban’s Art Deco Building from the 1920s. (The brutal, cage-like addition shows no connection to the previous building which is completely hollowed out - a shell of its former self.)
• It  almost seems like a promotional video due to its largely uncritical tone which borders on hero-worship.
• The final sequence of the movie is about Masdar city which, in my opinion, is Foster’s take on “Lawrence of Arabia meets Flash Gordon.” The arabesque-decorated, vintage science-fiction-like township is a strange attempt to create a sustainable city in the desert.
• Even though I admire Norman Foster and his life’s achievement, I left feeling sorry for him. It’s obvious to me that his entire approach is limited to the clever usage of superior materials and technology, an apotheosis of modernism.

The film is still worth watching in my opinion. However, the important question is not how much your building weighs, Mr. Foster, it is more whether the world needs your high-tech luxury icons. The weight of a building is only interesting to a few priviledged people. For the great majority of us, we are mainly interested in how your architecture is going to find solutions for people in their day-to-day life – a point which wasn’t considered in this film.

The film is airing again in Auckland on Sunday, July 24 and Wednesday, July 27. For other show times around New Zealand please visit the NZ International Film Festival’s website.

- Posted July 21, 2011