Some quotes from a lengthy article (worth a read in the link).
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/01/27/norman-foster-profile
By Ian Parker
January 20, 2025
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As we talked, near a model of the new tower, several JPMorgan executives passed by, perhaps not by chance, and said hello. (A bystander might have judged Foster, and not the bank, to be the powerful client.) The well-wishers included Daniel Pinto, an executive junior only to the C.E.O., Jamie Dimon. “So it’s almost done, right?” Pinto said, pleasantly, adding that he had some thoughts about the choice of art works on the upper floors. “We need to find the right size for the right walls,” he said. Foster had already helped to secure commissions for the building from artists he has long known, including Maya Lin and Gerhard Richter. He suggested a meeting: “Let’s find some time.”
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Arena told me, “Of course, we’re risk managers, so selecting Norman as a partner was easy.” It’s fair to compliment Foster + Partners on extreme reliability, in design and execution. But Arena seemed to recognize that his praise lacked some poetry, and he added that JPMorgan had “boiled the ocean” in its search for an architect—a private competition had begun with a field of dozens. After calling Foster “arguably the greatest architect of all time,” Arena said, “When you build a building, you think: It’s going to be a sculpture! Let’s make it round, let’s make it octagonal!
But Norman’s view has been, from the beginning: The street grid is orthogonal, the zoning is set up a particular way, let’s make it look like it wants to look, in the urban context.” (The zoning rules that first produced progressive, “wedding cake” setbacks, like those of the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building, were rewritten long ago, but that silhouette puts you in good company.) Arena added that he and his colleagues had been impressed by a Foster + Partners tower, at 425 Park Avenue, that opened a few years ago, and is half occupied by Citadel, the hedge fund, and its trading arm. Kenneth Griffin, Citadel’s C.E.O., is now part of a team developing a third Foster tower on the strip, at 350 Park Avenue.
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We came out into a high-ceilinged, raw area that by this summer will be a gallery and a “sky bar” for client and employee events. We were about twelve hundred feet above the street. “This is man-made!” Foster said. “It’s so blindingly obvious but worth repeating. Look at this!” He sounded both sincere and a little strained, suggesting that it is more natural for him to think such things than to say them. On the east side, there was no curtain wall yet—just sky, and a waist-high barrier of wire and netting. To the south, a glass panel dangled from an unseen crane; harnessed workers, high above us, were nudging it into place. “Somebody’s controlling that—and it’s within millimetres,” Foster said. Then: “Now it’s in place! We’ve only been here a minute.”
We looked out over a hazy midtown. “Chrysler, my favorite,” Foster said.
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At the end of the tour of 270 Park, Foster and David Arena, the JPMorgan executive, returned to the company’s temporary headquarters, and spent a few minutes talking about Foster’s piece of kinetic art for the new building. It will mark his New York début as a visual artist. A few years ago, Foster conceived of a “cloud sculpture” for a planned restaurant at 425 Park Avenue, to be run by Daniel Humm, of Eleven Madison Park. But Humm’s embrace of veganism scared off his would-be landlord, and these clouds were never made.
For JPMorgan, Foster has designed a set of four forty-foot tapering, fluted, bronze-clad columns, serving as flagpoles. Three of them will stand outdoors, in front of the Park Avenue entrance. The fourth will be in the lobby. The flag there will be moved by air forced out at the top of the pole. “It flutters, but is not a hologram,” Foster said, happily. “It’s very tangible.”
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Last edited by NYguy; Jan 20, 2025 at 5:31 PM.
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