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An accumulation of signs can carry architecture only so far, because architecture in its root and essence is very much more than sign language. Yesterday's ironies wrap today's garbage. Architecture has to go deeper, find real human needs and deal with those. Foster likes to list them in simple terms: the structure that holds a building up; the services that let it work; "the ecology of the building--whether it is naturally ventilated, whether you can open the windows, the quality of light"; the mass or lightness of its materials; its relationship to the site, the street and the landscape view; the symbolism of the form. All these, he argues, must be accounted for "whether you are creating a landmark or deferring to a historic setting."
Foster can handle both with equal aplomb. In 1993 he completed a cultural center for the French city of Nimes, in Provence. It is right next to the city's most famous Roman monument, the so-called Maison Carree--a Corinthian temple dedicated to Augustus' sons in the year A.D. 4. It was Thomas Jefferson's favorite classical building--in fact, Jefferson based his whole conception of Neo-Classical architecture on it--and one obviously had to approach such a historical object with caution. Would the solution be a pastiche historical arts center? Foster was sure not. "I went there incognito before the commission was announced," he recalls. "I walked the site for hours. The challenge was to do a contemporary building that could face the Roman temple directly but not be intimidated by it." The result, a crystalline rectangular structure with sun screens, does exactly that. Its transparent grid defers to the pillar-and-architrave opacity of the ancient stone building without mimicking it.
The same kind of thinking occurs in Foster's unfinished project for the British Museum. When its library moved to massive new premises a mile away, it left behind one of the great English spaces: the 1857 Round Reading Room designed by Sydney Smirke, with its shallow dome, surrounded by a two-acre internal court. To demolish this masterpiece would have been unthinkable. It had to be preserved, and Foster's scheme for so doing entailed sweeping away the clutter of now obsolete bookstack buildings from around it and covering the court with a light glass-and-steel roof, thus creating Europe's largest enclosed space, which will function as the access core of the museum.
Foster's genius--the word is hardly too strong--is most apparent in his structural thought. He has often been called a high-tech architect, but actually, despite the complexity of some of his designs, the buildings don't brandish their technological language as gee-whiz metaphor; they use it as an essential tool of spatial effects and structural needs, always seeking the most elegant and succinct solution. "The idea of high-tech is a bit misleading," Foster says. "Since Stonehenge, architects have always been at the cutting edge of technology. And you can't separate technology from the humanistic and spiritual content of a building."