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The ideal of humane efficiency, understood as social responsibility, undergirds all of Foster's work. No living architect has thought more closely about the ecological effects of his buildings. In his brilliant 1991 design for Frankfurt's Commerzbank, the tallest office building in Europe, he brought off the seemingly impossible feat of building a supertower that could use natural ventilation (as against fuel-gobbling air conditioning) during 60% of the year. "Anything that reduces energy consumption and cuts down on greenhouse gases is good news," he says. In his redesign of the Reichstag, the seat of German government in Berlin, Foster has carried this out to an extraordinary degree. He noted that the old Reichstag, heated and cooled by fossil fuels, produced 7,000 tons of carbon dioxide a year. Foster came up with a system of "driving the building" with renewable vegetable oils, such as rapeseed, for fuel. Its CO2 emissions have dropped 94%, to 440 tons a year. The waste heat is converted into cooling capacity, and the small heat surplus is dumped into aquifers 1,000 ft. below ground level, where it is stored and recovered in winter.
You can, of course, do a building that's eco-responsible but aesthetically worthless. The crux of Foster's achievement is to have designed megastructures that are at the forefront of eco-design as well as beautiful in their own right. He is a fine detailer--everything from the junctures of a beam to the cladding to the door handles comes out of the same relentless aesthetic concentration. But on the wider scale, Foster is also one of the great living manipulators of light and transparency. No other government building in the world, for instance, can boast anything as outright exhilarating as the great inverted cone sheathed in 360 mirrors that floods the Reichstag with daylight.
Light is part of the very subject matter of Foster's buildings, along with steel, glass and stone. When Foster speaks of "the spiritual dimension" of architecture, and its power to "lift the spirit," he's talking about the action of light in space. Anyone who supposes that technology, or the exacting use of modern materials, implies a break with the past should look at Foster's work--and learn.
--With reporting by Maria Cheng/Hong Kong