Marveling at a Maestro of Glass, Steel and Light
By A. O. SCOTT
Published: January 24, 2012
“How Much Does Your Building Weigh, Mr. Foster?,” an admiring documentary about the British architect Norman Foster, by Norberto López Amado and Carlos Carcas, gives the viewer quite a lot to marvel at, which is, after all, the root meaning of the word “admire.”
Accompanied by Joan Valent’s pulsing, soaring score, the camera swoops over some of Mr. Foster’s largest and best-known structures and floats through the bright and airy interiors of his skyscrapers. Even before you hear Paul Goldberger (a former architecture critic for The New York Times, currently at The New Yorker) describe Mr. Foster as “the Mozart of Modernism,” you can appreciate the grace and harmony of his compositions in glass, steel and light.
Mr. Goldberger’s words are among the more substantive in a film that at times seems ready to levitate from the screen on puffy clouds of praise. Deyan Sudjic, director of the Design Museum in London, who wrote and delivers the voice-over narration, manages to note, in passing, that Mr. Foster has critics, but none are seen or heard from. And for a film that proposes to take the ideas and creativity of its subject seriously, the near complete absence of criticism, by which I mean not necessarily dismissal or debunking but rather analysis and argument, is more than a little disappointing.
Instead there is affectionate testimony from Mr. Foster’s colleagues and friends and also from his fellow members of the fraternity of global cultural celebrities, notably the musician Bono and the sculptor Anish Kapoor. (The title comes from a conversation between Mr. Foster and Buckminster Fuller.) They and the others speak in general terms about Mr. Foster’s vision and artistry, and they take note of his habits and hobbies. He loves airplanes, draws constantly and is a devoted skier. We see Mr. Foster, now 76, participating in a cross-country race through some very beautiful snow and also spending time at home with his young son.
The man himself is articulate, thoughtful and somewhat reserved, and he is also by far the most incisive and interesting of the film’s talking heads. He briskly fills in important details of his biography, including his working-class Manchester upbringing, graduate school at Yale and the founding of his first firm, a small outfit that designed strikingly innovative factories and office buildings.
The visual tours of those and later projects — the Sainsbury Center for Visual Arts at the University of East Anglia, the Hearst Building in Manhattan, the former Swiss Re Tower (popularly known as the Gherkin) in London — enrich the sometimes abstract and superficial explanations of their origin and form. Toward the end there is a burst of intellectual momentum as the discussion turns to the challenges of sustainable planning and large-scale construction in a rapidly developing world.
There is no doubt that Mr. Foster and his associates have thought about these environmental issues, but rather than open them up for discussion — in the manner, say, of Gary Hustwit’s recent documentary “Urbanized” — “How Much Does Your Building Weigh, Mr. Foster?” pays lip service to their vital importance. Potentially thornier matters involving labor, power and global capital are skated over. Recalling his company’s work on an airport in Beijing, Mr. Foster marvels at the Chinese government’s ability to mobilize 50,000 workers, who labored in staggered, round-the-clock shifts and lived onsite.
Like Steve Jobs, another Western aesthetic visionary with an enthusiasm for nondemocratic industrial relations, Mr. Foster views the world through a lens of supreme self-confidence. But work that is so sleek and beautiful and in tune with its time deserves more scrutiny than this movie by Mr. López Amado and Mr. Carcas provides. Instead, “How Much Does Your Building Weigh, Mr. Foster?” celebrates its prominent and powerful subject in a manner more befitting corporate public relations than documentary film.
How Much Does Your Building Weigh, Mr. Foster?
Opens on Wednesday in Manhattan.
Directed by Norberto López Amado and Carlos Carcas; written and narrated by Deyan Sudjic; director of photography, Valentín Álvarez; edited by Paco Cozar; music by Joan Valent; produced by Elena Ochoa; released by First Run Features. At the IFC Center, 323 Avenue of the Americas, at Third Street, Greenwich Village. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. This film is not rated.
Article from The New York Times
