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:

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 »

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. 🥂