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Biography The Prefabricated Home High Tech Architecture More books More essays to download Diary Blog email Colin Davies		More essays by Colin Davies Norman Foster's London Published in Architecture Today, May 2007 Landmarks and lost opportunities We nearly lost him. When the Team 4 partnership with Richard and Su Rogers broke up in 1968, Norman and Wendy Foster, having no work, seriously considered emigrating to the States. Then, just in time, along came a progressive client with a sizable job: an amenity centre – showers, toilets, a canteen and some offices – for workers at the then still active Millwall dock on Isle of Dogs. It was not, on the face of it, a promising commission on which to base an architectural reputation, but when the finished building was published in the Architects’ Journal, students and young architects up and down the country gazed into the mirror of that sheer glass, neoprene-gasketed wall and saw the future. We had already admired Team 4’s Reliance Controls factory in Swindon – its Miesian steel frame with exposed cross bracing (destined to be imitated ad nauseam in the years to come) and the way that it refused to distinguish between offices and factory – but the Fred Olsen amenity centre went further. This wasn’t Miesian, this was new. We sensed the colours, the green carpet and the mauve walls, even though the photographs were in black and white. And when we looked closely at the plans and the perspective section we marvelled at the utter simplicity of the concept. It was so obvious. Why hadn’t we thought of it? Lessons at the Roadside Published in Architectural Research Quarterly, Volume 8, Number 1, 2004 Diners, drive-in restaurants, petrol stations, motorway services, local supermarkets: architectural culture mostly ingores these building types, but they are cheap, efficient, usually prefabricated and there is a great deal to learn from them. ... Roadside architecture can teach architects more than just how to communicate. It can teach them about repetition and reliability, about the appeal of the temporary and the provisional, and about the benefits of a loose relationship between a building and its physical setting. Most obviously, it can teach them how to make prefabricated buildings that are really, not just theoretically, cheaper. The obvious example to take is the drive-in or drive-thru fast-food restaurant, but from the point of view of prefabrication the drive-in had an interesting precursor in the American diner. The history of the diner is like a differently coloured version of the history of the mobile home... The British Airport at the Turn of the Century Published in ‘The Architecture of British Transport in the Twentieth Century’, Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. For most people time spent at an airport is like time spent in hospital - an unwanted interruption of normal life to be endured rather than enjoyed. This is curious, because it does not seem to apply to other travel interchange experiences such as boarding a ship or a catching a train. Why is it that the architecture associated with the miracle of flight in a jet propelled machine of awesome beauty should stubbornly refuse to gather around it any of the romance and excitement of the quayside or the railway terminus? Does it perhaps have something to do with the necessary spatial discontinuity between those that are travelling and those that are staying behind - the absence of any goodbye waves from deck rail or carriage window? The Architecture of the Home Published in 'Home", a Common Words anthology of prose and poetry, edited by Dinah Livingstone, Katabasis, 2000 ...'Only if we are capable of dwelling,' says Heidegger, 'only then can we build.' You might not wholly agree with this austere proposition (are we all to become peasants again?) but if there is any truth in it, then one thing is clear: the people who design and build dwellings are faced with a tough problem. The conditions for the creation of vernacular architecture no longer exist in the 'developed' world. Architects, by definition, can't do vernacular. Architectural design is always a self-conscious activity. Artifice always intervenes. And yet the idea of a 'natural' kind of building has hovered in the background of architectural thinking ever since 18th century theorists sought the origins of classical architecture in the primitive hut... Work and Technology Published in 'Work', a Common Words anthology of prose and poetry, edited by Dinah Livingstone, Katabasis, 1999. ...Work in the modern world is inseparable from technology. We crave the wealth that technology provides and we work to gain our share of it. And yet the more technology advances, and the more its advance accelerates, the more we think of it as an alien force beyond our control. We contribute to it, we are implicated in it, and yet we fear it. We are filled with dread when we hear the news that a sheep has been cloned, that a computer has won a chess tournament against the world champion, that it is possible to choose the sex of our children, or that machines are beginning to think for themselves, just like human beings. It is often said that we live in a technological world and that the progress of technology is inevitable. But nobody is asking us if we want it. Nobody is proposing any alternative. We seem to have no choice. We may be wealthy, but we feel powerless...