Norman Foster Is Still Looking Upward

Norman Foster. Credit: Elliott Verdier for The New York Times
Norman Foster. Credit: Elliott Verdier for The New York Times
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Norman Foster Is Still Looking Upward

Norman Foster. Credit: Elliott Verdier for The New York Times
Norman Foster. Credit: Elliott Verdier for The New York Times

London - Farah Nayeri

Take the escalators to the top of the Pompidou Center in Paris and you’ll reach the museum’s largest exhibition hall, Gallery 1 — a vast space which, over the years, has hosted surveys of art-historical heavyweights like Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and Salvador Dalí. Now, for the first time, Gallery 1 is showcasing the work of an architect: Norman Foster.

Foster, 87, was approached by the museum in 2018 to exhibit his work in the ground-level gallery often used for architecture shows, but he wanted to display many more objects than would fit. So, he was granted a space that’s nearly three times bigger, said the exhibition’s curator, Frédéric Migayrou. To help cover the extra costs, Foster secured sponsorship from companies whose buildings he had designed, Migayrou added.

As an architect, Foster has harnessed technology to make buildings that are modern yet aim for ecological soundness. He has reinvented structures such as office towers and airports by moving bulky mechanical elements out of the way — to the sides, below ground — and letting light in.

Notable landmarks include the soaring Millau Viaduct in southern France, the glass-roofed Great Court of the British Museum, the circular Apple headquarters in Cupertino, Calif., and the Reichstag building in Berlin — a spectacular glass cupola fitted over what was a bombed-out edifice. In the year of its inauguration, 1999, Foster received the Pritzker Architecture Prize and became a member of the House of Lords, the upper house of Britain’s Parliament.

Foster recently spoke in a video interview from the Pompidou Center, where he was installing his show. (The exhibition opened Wednesday and runs through Aug. 7.) The conversation has been edited and condensed.

How does it feel to have a retrospective at the Centre Pompidou?

There’s inevitably an element of nostalgia, because on the night of the official opening, back in the 1970s, I was outside the Centre Pompidou when the French President opened the building.

There’s only one Pompidou. Breaking down the boundaries between the arts of design, architecture, painting, and sculpture, is right at the heart of the cultural message of this building, which is free and open.

You’ve been quoted as saying that architecture is too often treated as fine art, “delicately wrapped in mumbo jumbo,” when in fact it incorporates disciplines including science, math, and engineering. Is there a tension between beauty and functionality in architecture?

No, there shouldn’t be. My objectives as an architect are the material and the spiritual, and I can’t separate the two. One is to keep the rain off, keep you dry when it’s wet, keep you cool when it’s hot, look after your material comfort. The other is your spiritual comfort: to incline the building so you have a view, to bring in the sun and a shaft of light to create shadow, to give you a surprise when you enter a space. If the architect is not doing this, then the architect is not acting as an architect. Architecture is as much about the soul and the spirit as it is about the material.

In the exhibition wall texts, you say that a vertical community well served by public transport can be a model of sustainability. How can urban high-rises be the future in an age of human-induced climate change?

I think they’re more relevant than ever. Just look at the energy consumed by cities that are compact, walkable, and well-served by public transport, compared with cities that sprawl and have long commutes. A high-rise city like Manhattan is highly sustainable from the standpoint of energy consumption. People live close to where they work: It’s not dependent on a car, it’s not alienated in a suburb. Medium-rise cities like London or Paris are more sustainable than Los Angeles or Houston, which sprawl and are dependent on cars.

Buildings account for 40 percent of world energy consumption. Doesn’t that carbon footprint mean that your profession is facing obsolescence?

Look at societies like ours which consume the most energy. Statistically, we live longer, infant mortality is lower, and life expectancy is greater. We have more personal freedom. Notwithstanding exceptions, we have less violence and fewer wars. High consumption of energy is good for you, for society, and for medical research.

The imperative is to generate clean energy. The cleanest source of energy, by a huge margin, is nuclear. There’s no reason why, using clean energy, we shouldn’t be converting seawater into jet fuel and decarbonizing the ocean at the same time. That’s our future.

Climate activists would severely disagree with you.

But one must separate facts from hysteria and emotion.

You say we need to get away from transportation that damages the climate. Yet why are you so engaged in building airports?

We all deplore the carbon emissions generated by air travel. We also deplore the massive amount of carbon emissions every time we eat a hamburger, which makes air travel look, by comparison, almost insignificant.

Yes, air travel generates carbon. But what about the infrastructure of transport? Airports are connected by cars, by subway systems, by railways. The whole world is mobile. We’re not going to stop moving overnight. It’s a connected world. It’s not just about moving people: It’s also about moving freight, responding to world emergencies, and providing aid.

If we can make that infrastructure more sustainable — consuming less energy and recycling more material — then we have a responsibility to do it as architects. We can’t be ostriches burying our heads in the sand.

You’re not frightened by the future?

No. I’m frightened by anything which would threaten my family, myself, or the community around me. There’s always some boogeyman on the horizon. At any point in time, individuals and families, and communities have been threatened by their neighbors, by the weather, by drought. We like to think that these things are new to us — and, of course, climate change is new. But climate change takes a back seat when you have a pandemic, and if there’s a meteorite suddenly hurling toward you.

Zaha Hadid was the first woman to win the Pritzker Prize, in 2004. Since then, few women have been recognized in that way. Is architecture still a male-dominated profession?

My daughter went to Harvard University to study art history and converted to architecture in the first year. She now works for an architect in London and is going to Yale University to study architecture. More and more, schools of architecture are dominated by women, which is fantastic. It’s a profession that is in transition, and some of those changes are long overdue. I see the kind of bias that you’re talking about, and I deplore it.

Which of your buildings do you think people will look back on in 50 years and consider important?

The buildings that I would like to think would endure would be those buildings that have become symbols of democracy, of a way of life, of a nation. I would hope that the Reichstag would continue to architecturally embody those virtues. It’s also a manifesto of clean energy, zero carbon, and of Berlin’s transition from its wartime role to its peacetime role. As architecture, it’s very much about values.

Your colleague Renzo Piano once said: “Buildings stay forever, like forests, like rivers.” Do you agree?

Buildings last as long as they’re useful. The history of architecture, like cities, is a history of renewal. Cities are our greatest invention: an agglomeration, a coming together of individual buildings. The urban glue that binds them together determines the quality of our lives more than any individual building. I’d like to think that buildings last forever, but realistically, the only constant is change.

 

The New York Times



Researchers Document Huge Drop in African Elephants in a Half Century

 Elephants walk at the Amboseli National Park in Kajiado County, Kenya, April 4, 2024. REUTERS/Monicah Mwangi/File Photo
Elephants walk at the Amboseli National Park in Kajiado County, Kenya, April 4, 2024. REUTERS/Monicah Mwangi/File Photo
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Researchers Document Huge Drop in African Elephants in a Half Century

 Elephants walk at the Amboseli National Park in Kajiado County, Kenya, April 4, 2024. REUTERS/Monicah Mwangi/File Photo
Elephants walk at the Amboseli National Park in Kajiado County, Kenya, April 4, 2024. REUTERS/Monicah Mwangi/File Photo

African elephants are Earth's largest land animals, remarkable mammals that are very intelligent and highly social. They also are in peril. Fresh evidence of this comes in a study that documents alarming population declines at numerous sites across the continent over about a half century.

Researchers unveiled on Monday what they called the most comprehensive assessment of the status of the two African elephant species - the savanna elephant and forest elephant - using data on population surveys conducted at 475 sites in 37 countries from 1964 through 2016.

The savanna elephant populations fell by about 70% on average at the surveyed sites and the forest elephant populations dropped by about 90% on average at the surveyed sites, with poaching and habitat loss the main drivers. All told, there was a 77% population decrease on average at the various surveyed sites, spanning both species, Reuters reported.

Elephants vanished at some sites while their populations increased in other places thanks to conservation efforts.

"A lot of the lost populations won't come back, and many low-density populations face continued pressures. We likely will lose more populations going forward," said George Wittemyer, a Colorado State University professor of wildlife conservation and chair of the scientific board of the conservation group Save the Elephants, who helped lead the study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Poaching typically involves people killing elephants for their tusks, which are sold illegally on an international black market driven mostly by ivory demand in China and other parts of Asia. Agricultural expansion is the top factor in habitat loss.

The forest elephant population is estimated to be about a third that of savanna elephants. Poaching has affected forest elephants disproportionately and has ravaged populations of both species in northern and eastern Africa.

"We have lost a number of elephant populations across many countries, but the northern Sahel region of Africa - for example in Mali, Chad and Nigeria - has been particularly hard hit. High pressure and limited protection have culminated in populations being extirpated," Wittemyer said.

But in southern Africa, elephant populations rose at 42% of the surveyed sites.

"We have seen real success in a number of places across Africa, but particularly in southern Africa, with strong growth in populations in Botswana, Zimbabwe and Namibia. For populations showing positive trends, we have had active stewardship and management by the governments or outside groups that have taken on a management role," Wittemyer said.

The study did not track a continent-wide population tally because the various surveys employed different methodologies over different time frames to estimate local elephant population density, making a unified head count impossible. Instead, it assessed population trends at each of the surveyed sites.

A population estimate by conservationists conducted separately from this study put the two species combined at between 415,000 and 540,000 elephants as of 2016, the last year of the study period. It remains the most recent comprehensive continent-wide estimate.

"The loss of large mammals is a significant ecological issue for Africa and the planet," said conservation ecologist and study co-author Dave Balfour, a research associate in the Centre for African Conservation Ecology at Nelson Mandela University in South Africa.

The world's third extant elephant species, the slightly smaller Asian elephant, faces its own population crisis, with similar factors at play as in Africa.

Of African elephants, Wittemyer said, "While the trends are not good, it is important to recognize the successes we have had and continue to have. Learning how and where we can be successful in conserving elephants is as important as recognizing the severity of the decline they have experienced."

Wittemyer added of these elephants: "Not only one of the most sentient and intelligent species we share the planet with, but also an incredibly important part of ecosystems in Africa that structures the balance between forest and grasslands, serves as a critical disperser of seeds, and is a species on which a multitude of other species depend on for survival."