The annual Pritzker Prize--$100,000 plus a gold medal--is by far the most prestigious award in architecture today. It is like the Nobels for literature or for the promotion of peace, though not as hotly debated, there being no architectural equivalent to Dario Fo--still less to Rigoberta Menchu. It is given not for promise but to uphold the ideal of excellence. Twenty men (but no women) have received it since Philip Johnson got the first one in 1979; they range from Mexico's Luis Barragan to Italy's Renzo Piano, from Britain's James Stirling to America's Frank Gehry. This year's laureate, announced this week, is another Brit: England's Sir Norman Foster, 63. "Every award is special," says Foster, "but there's only one Pritzker. It's a recognition of the importance of architecture itself."
Foster, like his former partner Richard Rogers (who has a peerage, but no Pritzker as yet), is a pivotal figure in British architecture. But his buildings have risen all over the world, from Germany to China, and at present his practice employs some 500 people. His influence on the profession is enormous. His 1985 tower for the Hongkong & Shanghai Bank headquarters in Hong Kong, for instance, reversed the general dogma that a high-rise office block had to have a solid central core: it is not a "block" but a frame, a vertical web whose generous, open ground level has become a Sunday gathering spot for Hong Kong's Filipina maids. It has probably done more to change the way people think about what Foster calls "the culture of office buildings" and the relation of the corporate to the public domain in a city's matrix than any other 20th century structure.
"Sire, do not talk to me of small projects," said the Great Cham of baroque architecture, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, to Louis XIV after the Sun King lured him to Paris. Foster is too much of a democrat to echo that sentiment, but it's a fact that his imagination runs naturally on the epic scale and that, more surprisingly, large size doesn't diminish the humanistic and spiritual qualities of his buildings.
The most heartening and invigorating thing about Foster's design sense is its clarity, the insistence that the poetics of a building must grow out of its legible and fully expressed structure. Foster has never been even faintly tempted by the clutter of secondhand allusion and quotation that infested so much Post-Modernist building in America and elsewhere--the kind of stuck-on, boutique historicism represented by Philip Johnson's 1984 Chippendale-top skyscraper for AT&T in New York City or Robert Stern's recyclings of the Shingle Style. It may be that PoMo quotation, of which a gutful has been served up over the past 25 years, served a useful purpose in reminding architecture's public that, yes, there was indeed a vast repertory of form and ornament on which early, messianic Modernism had turned its back. But it was mostly skin deep, and it kept turning into a kind of false nostalgia--a parallel to the rash of "heritage" fetishism in the 1980s.