Inside an Architect’s Factory of Fine Design
In today’s newsletter, how to make sense of the latest from the Trump Administration. And Cal Newport on the best way to regulate social media for children. But, first, a transportive Profile by Ian Parker about perhaps the most powerful architect working today. Plus:
Foster, still relentless at eighty-nine, has dotted continents with tidy, elegant structures, from art galleries to airports. He is very good at designing. He’s also very good at making his colleagues not stop designing.Photograph by Julia Fullerton-Batten for The New Yorker; set design by Jaina Minton
Norman Foster’s Empire of Image Control
The British architect has built an unprecedented factory of fine design. Inside the world of the man who creates exquisite monuments for ultra-wealthy clients.
Ian Parker has, among his many reporting projects, made a specialty of chronicling visionary architects and designers at the moment they are about to drop a new shape into our visual landscape—Bjarke Ingels at work on his jagged pyramid on the West Side Highway, or Thomas Heatherwick about to unleash his arresting, and ill-fated, Vessel at Hudson Yards. (He has also captured at least one major act of destruction: Kanye West’s incomprehensible remix of a Tadao Ando treasure in Malibu.) For this week’s issue, Parker offers an intimate portrait of Sir Norman Foster, a man who meets with the King of England, owns Barack Obama’s former vacation rental on Martha’s Vineyard, and whose firm has designed such high-tech modern monuments as the glass Reichstag dome, in Berlin, the ring-shaped headquarters for Apple, in California, and the towering new JPMorgan Chase building under construction in Manhattan. Yet amid all the master-of-the-universe trappings, the key to Foster’s immense success in marrying high design and brutal function may be something more simple. As Parker notes, “The work makes you glad, while you’re there, that you’re not somewhere else.” Read or listen to the story »
The First Days of Trump 2.0
Photograph by Doug Mills / NYT / Redux
-
How much power does Trump have? The Administration’s fire hose of executive orders on issues ranging from immigration to renaming bodies of water amounts to “a bold assertion that the President can go toe to toe with the other two branches of government to make and interpret law,” Jeannie Suk Gersen writes. Are Congress or the courts willing to push back?
-
The end of federal D.E.I. programs: Trump has rescinded a variety of executive orders issued by previous Presidents over the decades directed at fostering diversity and increasing opportunity for women and other historically marginalized groups in the federal workforce and among private businesses with government contracts. Hua Hsu has explored how ideas about diversity have been weaponized by the right. And Emma Green has reported on the broader backlash against D.E.I.
-
Pete Hegseth’s next steps: The nominee for Secretary of Defense is up for a full Senate vote before the end of the week, amid new allegations of abusive behavior. Read Jane Mayer’s reporting on Hegseth’s secret history of alleged drinking, poor management, and misogyny, and on the Republican plan to push his confirmation.
-
“Have mercy”: On Tuesday, Reverend Mariann Edgar Budde, the Episcopal bishop of Washington, addressed the President directly in a homily at the Washington National Cathedral, asking him to show compassion for immigrants, members of the L.G.B.T.Q. community, and others, noting, “We were all once strangers in this land.” Today, Trump demanded an apology, calling her “nasty in tone, and not compelling or smart.” It’s a familiar playbook, the latest of Trump’s public feuds with “nasty” women.
More Top Stories
Daily Cartoon
“Act now—the first fifty callers receive a Presidential pardon.”
Cartoon by Kaamran Hafeez
More Fun & Games
P.S. Dry January? This year? For anyone still holding on to resolutions of abstention, John Seabrook’s search for a sober buzz might offer a few drinking alternatives to help you make it to the end of the month. 🥂
Source link
