From the September issue: Here’s the sort of thing that writers on architecture rarely, if ever, get to say: In the design of Tower 2 of the World Trade Center site, Sir Norman Foster has been replaced by Bjarke Ingels, a man exactly half his age.
Lord Foster is 80 years old, but he stands, in architectural terms, on the outer edge of middle age. Architecture, especially as practiced in New York City over the past half century or so, is an older man’s game. Some of the most important practitioners here have been Frank Lloyd Wright, Philip Johnson and I. M. Pei, all of whom worked well into their 90s. In fact, Pei is still going strong at 98. By contrast, the relative youth of Ingels, all of 40 years old, is so striking that everyone who writes about him mentions the fact, and he himself must be thoroughly sick of hearing it. [more]