"The skyscraper is emblematic of the modern age city and is a reminder that the city is arguably civilization’s greatest invention. A vertical community, well served by public transport, can be a model of sustainability, especially when compared with a sprawling low-rise equivalent in a car-dependent suburb.
Our own design history of towers is one of challenging convention. We were the first to question the traditional tower, with its central core of mechanical plant, circulation and structure, and instead to create open, stacked spaces, flexible for change and with see-through views. This led to a further evolution with the first-ever series of “breathing” towers. In the quest to reduce energy consumption and create a healthier and more desirable lifestyle, we showed that a system of natural ventilation, moving large volumes of fresh, filtered air, could be part of a controlled internal climate.
With the revitalization of the iconic Transamerica Pyramid Center our design seeks to create a vibrant destination in the heart of San Francisco while respecting and celebrating the unique heritage of the building and restoring the historic Redwood Park. The biggest renovation in the building’s 50-year history, this redevelopment seeks to give a new lease of life to one of the city’s most recognizable landmarks and the second tallest building in the city."
Norman Foster
Founder & Executive Chairman, Foster + Partners
President, Norman Foster Foundation
2024
Transamerica Pyramid
San Francisco, USA
Foster + Partners’ restoration of the Transamerica Pyramid Center in San Francisco is the biggest renovation in the building’s 50-year history. The project gives a new lease of life to one of the city’s most recognizable landmark towers and revitalizes the historic Transamerica Redwood Park at its base.
Lead image © Julius Shulman for William L. Pereira and Associates J. Paul Getty Trust. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2004.R.10)
Foster + Partners’ transformation of the Transamerica Pyramid. Before and after photographs show how the design has been stripped back to the original structure as well as enhancing it at ground level by opening the lobby out to the surrounding park.
1962
Office Building for New Haven
Norman Foster’s Yale Masters student scheme for an office building was an early lesson in integrating a large building into a tight urban context. The plan responded to the curve of the site while also creating a series of protected plazas that linked the offices to an existing shopping mall.
“In Foster’s design, the areas of office space were broken up into column-free sections spanning concrete towers that housed vertical services. Surely an anticipation of his Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation headquarters building in Hong Kong”.
Robert A. M. Stern, American architect and Dean of the Yale School of Architecture
Lead image © Norman Foster Foundation
1979 - 1986
Hongkong and Shanghai Bank Headquarters
Hong Kong
Conceived during a sensitive period in the former colony’s history, the brief for the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank Headquarters was a statement of confidence: to create ‘the best bank building in the world’. Through a process of questioning and challenging – including the involvement of a feng shui geomancer − the project addressed the nature of banking in Hong Kong and how it should be expressed in built form. In doing so it virtually reinvented the office tower.
The requirement to build in excess of a million square feet in a short timescale suggested a high degree of prefabrication, including factory-finished modules, while the need to build downwards and upwards simultaneously led to the adoption of a suspension structure, with pairs of steel masts arranged in three bays. As a result, the building form is articulated in a stepped profile of three individual towers, respectively twenty-nine, thirty-six and forty-four storeys high, which create floors of varying width and depth and allow for garden terraces. The mast structure allowed another radical move, pushing the service cores to the perimeter to create deep-plan floors around a ten-storey atrium. A mirrored ‘sunscoop’ reflects sunlight down through the atrium to the floor of a public plaza below – a sheltered space, which at weekends has become a lively picnic spot. From the plaza, escalators rise up through the glass underbelly to the banking hall, which was conceived as a ‘shop window for banking’.
The ‘bridges’ that span between the masts define double-height reception areas that break down the scale of the building both visually and socially. A unique system of movement through the building combines high-speed lifts to the reception spaces with escalators beyond, reflecting village-like clusters of office floors. From the outset, the Bank placed a high priority on flexibility. Interestingly, over the years, it has been able to reconfigure office layouts with ease, even incorporating a large dealers’ room into one floor − a move that could not have been anticipated when the building was designed.
Lead image © Nigel Young / Foster + Partners
1989
Millennium Tower
Tokyo, Japan
Tokyo is among the ‘megacities’ forecast to exceed populations of fifteen million by 2020. The Millennium Tower challenges assumptions about such future cities and presents a solution to the social challenges of urban expansion on this scale and the particular problems of Tokyo, with its acute land shortages. It provides a million square metres of commercial development, stands 170 storeys high and is the world’s tallest projected building.
Rising out of Tokyo Bay, the tower is capable of housing a community of up to 60,000 people, generating its own energy and processing its own waste. A vertical city quarter, it would be self-sustaining and virtually self-sufficient. The lower levels accommodate offices and clean industries such as consumer electronics. Above are apartments, while the uppermost section houses communications systems and wind generators. A highspeed ‘metro’ system − with cars designed to carry 160 people − tracks vertically and horizontally, moving through the building at twice the rate of conventional express lifts. Cars stop at sky centers at every thirtieth floor; from there, individual journeys may be completed via lifts or escalators. This continuous cycle reduces travel times − an important factor in a vertical city, no less than a horizontal one. The five-storey sky centers have different principal functions; one might include a hotel, another one a department store; each is articulated with mezzanines, terraces and gardens to create a sense of place.
Developed in response to the hurricane-strength wind forces and earthquakes for which the region is notorious, the tower’s conical structure, with its helical steel cage, is inherently stable. Developed in response to the hurricane-strength wind forces and earthquakes for which the region is notorious, the tower’s conical structure, with its helical steel cage, is inherently stable. It provides decreasing wind resistance towards the top − where it is completely open − and increasing width and strength towards the base to provide earthquake resistance. The project demonstrates that high-density or high-rise living can lead to an improved quality of life, where housing, work and leisure facilities are all conveniently close at hand.
Lead image © Obayashi Corporation
1987 - 1991
Century Tower
Tokyo, Japan
Century Tower grew out of a belief that the commercial realities of speculative offices could be reconciled with an architecture of quality and distinction. Although it advances ideas first explored in the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank, Century Tower is not a corporate headquarters but a prestige office block with a wide range of amenities, including a health club and museum.
Located in Bunkyo-ku, in the heart of Tokyo, the building occupies a site subject to complex zoning regulations. The design response was to divide the tower into two blocks, nineteen and twenty-one storeys high, linked by a narrow atrium. The outer form of the blocks is defined by eccentrically braced frames, responding to seismic engineering requirements in a city where earthquakes and typhoons are very real threats. Inside, the floors are spaced at double height with suspended mezzanines between them, allowing office spaces to be column-free and to enjoy natural light and views. Narrow bridges span the atrium, enabling tenants to lease entire floors. Previously it had been prohibited in Japan to combine open office atria with open-access floor space, due to fire regulations. These were overcome through the pioneering use of smoke-activated baffles – reminiscent of the flaps on aircraft wings – which, in the event of fire, descend from the main and mezzanine floors to accelerate air-flow from the atrium into the affected floor. Fans then draw smoke across the floor and out of the building to avoid smoke migration.
Beyond its technological innovations, Century Tower also sought to harmonise Eastern and Western aesthetic sensibilities, particularly through the use of water. At the foot of the atrium, polished black granite water tables overflow to feed water walls, which in turn frame a staircase that leads to a museum for the client’s collection of Oriental antiquities. The juxtaposition of light and dark and the calming effect of the water prepare the visitor for the cave-like museum with its precisely lit objects. Other facilities include a tea house, a restaurant and a health club and pool sheltered beneath a glazed catenary roof.
Lead image © Ian Lambot
1991 - 1997
Commerzbank Headquarters
Frankfurt, Germany
At fifty-three storeys, the Commerzbank is the world’s first ecological office tower and on completion it was the tallest building in Europe. The project explores the nature of the office environment, developing new ideas for its ecology and working patterns. Central to this concept is a reliance on natural systems of lighting and ventilation. Every office is daylit and has openable windows, allowing the occupants to control their own environment. The result is energy consumption levels equivalent to half those of conventional office towers – the offices are now naturally ventilated for 85% of the year.
The plan of the building is triangular, comprising three ‘petals’ − the office floors − and a ‘stem’ formed by a full-height central atrium. Winter gardens spiral up around the atrium to become the visual and social focus for four-storey office clusters. From the outside these gardens in the sky give the building a sense of transparency and lightness. Socially, they form focal points for village-like clusters of offices, providing places to meet colleagues or relax during breaks. Environmentally, they bring light and fresh air into the central atrium, which acts as a natural ventilation chimney for the inwardfacing offices. Depending on each garden’s orientation, planting is from one of three regions: North America, Asia or the Mediterranean.
The tower has a distinctive presence on the Frankfurt skyline but is also anchored into the lower scale city fabric, through the restoration and sensitive rebuilding of the perimeter structures to reinforce the original scale of the block. These buildings provide shops, car parking, apartments and a banking hall, and help to forge links between the Commerzbank and the broader community.
At the heart of the scheme is a public galleria. With its restaurants, cafés and spaces for social and cultural events, it has become a popular pedestrian thoroughfare. Interestingly, on the day the Commerzbank opened, the Financial Times adopted it as the symbol of Frankfurt, just as it features the Houses of Parliament and the Eiffel Tower as symbols of London and Paris.
Lead image © Nigel Young / Foster + Partners
1997 - 2004
30 St Mary Axe
London, England
London’s first ecological tall building and an instantly recognisable addition to the city’s skyline, 30 St Mary Axe is rooted in a radical approach − technically, architecturally, socially and spatially.
Forty storeys high, it provides 46,400 square metres net of office space together with an arcade of shops and cafés accessed from a newly created piazza. At the summit is a club room that offers a spectacular 360-degree panorama across the capital.
Generated by a circular plan, with a radial geometry, the building widens in profile as it rises and tapers towards its apex. This distinctive form responds to the constraints of the site: the building appears more slender than a rectangular block of equivalent size and the slimming of its profile towards the base maximises the public realm at street level. Environmentally, its profile reduces wind deflections compared with a rectilinear tower of similar size, helping to maintain a comfortable environment at ground level, and creates external pressure differentials that are exploited to drive a unique system of natural ventilation.
Conceptually the tower develops ideas explored in the Commerzbank and before that in the Climatroffice, a theoretical project with Buckminster Fuller that suggested a new rapport between nature and the workplace, its energy-conscious enclosure resolving walls and roof into a continuous triangulated skin. Here, the tower’s diagonally braced structure allows column-free floor space and a fully glazed facade, which opens up the building to light and views. Atria between the radiating fingers of each floor link vertically to form a series of informal break-out spaces that spiral up the building. These spaces are a natural social focus – places for refreshment points and meeting areas – and function as the building’s ‘lungs’, distributing fresh air drawn in through opening panels in the facade. This system reduces the building’s reliance on air conditioning and together with other sustainable measures, means that it uses only half the energy consumed by a conventionally air-conditioned office tower.
Lead image © Nigel Young / Foster + Partners
1996−2005
Deutsche Bank Place
Sydney, Australia
Since the design of the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank, the practice has continued to redefine the nature of the office tower and to explore ways in which it can respond to the context and the spirit of the city in which it stands. This thirty-one-storey building, located on a prominent site close to Sydney Harbour, explores new strategies for flexible, column-free office space and creates a new ‘urban room’ in the city’s dense central business district.
The building’s unusual design and distinctive profile were guided by number of factors, including the narrow site, the need for large open floor plates, and exacting planning regulations that protected the amount of sunlight falling on two nearby public spaces. The building’s orientation exploits a number of environmental factors and maximises views across the Harbour. Daylight is drawn into the office levels and down through the building via an atrium, which runs the full height of the tower between the core and the office floors and is crossed by a series of bridges.
Movement through the building is clarified and celebrated, the atrium and lobbies being both physically and psychologically removed from the workplace. The main structural core is offset to the lower, western edge of the site and consists of two towers, which provide the main stiffening elements and act as solar buffers. To permit greater flexibility in planning office layouts, curtain walling on the three glazed facades has been turned ‘inside out’ with mullions and transoms placed externally.
At ground level, the private world of the tower meets the public realm of the city in a four-storey covered plaza – the ‘assembly’. This soaring, light-filled space functions as a busy public square. A prelude to the office lobbies, it also contains shops, cafés and a crèche. The central water feature that runs the length of the space can be controlled to enable all kinds of activities, including fashion shows and parties to take place there at any time of day.
Lead image © Richard Glover
2001 - 2006
Hearst Tower
New York, USA
Hearst Tower revives a dream from the 1920s, when publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst envisaged Columbus Circle as a new media quarter in Manhattan. Hearst commissioned a six storey Art Deco block on Eighth Avenue, anticipating that it would eventually form the base for a tower, though no such scheme was ever advanced. Echoing an approach developed in the Reichstag and the Great Court at the British Museum, the challenge in designing such a tower at seventy years remove was to establish a creative dialogue between old and new.
The new tower rises above the old building to a height of forty-four-storeys, linked on the outside by a skirt of glazing that encourages an impression of the tower floating weightlessly above the base. At the base of the tower, the main spatial event is a lobby that occupies the entire floor plate of the old building and rises up through six floors. Like a bustling town square, this dramatic space provides access to all parts of the building. It incorporates the main elevator lobby, the Hearst staff cafeteria and auditorium, and mezzanine levels for meetings and special functions. Structurally, the tower has a triangulated ‘diagrid’ form – a highly efficient solution that uses 20 per cent less steel than a conventionally framed structure. With the corners cut back between the diagonals, it creates a distinctive facetted silhouette on the Manhattan skyline.
The building is also significant in environmental terms. It was built using 85 per cent recycled steel, its heating and air-conditioning equipment utilises outside air for cooling and ventilation for nine months of the year, and it consumes 25 per cent less energy than an equivalent office building that complies minimally with the respective state and city codes. As a result, it was the first office building in Manhattan to achieve a gold rating under the US Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) programme in 2006. Since earning that prestigious honor, the building also received LEED Platinum certification in 2012 for the operations and maintenance of its existing building. As a company, Hearst places a high value on the quality of the working environment - something it believes will become increasingly important to its staff in the future - and it is hoped that Hearst’s experience may herald the construction of more environmentally sensitive buildings in the city.
Lead image © Chuck Choi
2013 -
Oceanwide Center
San Francisco, USA
Situated in the rapidly changing Transbay Area of San Francisco, close to Market Street and the financial district, the Oceanwide Center development comprises two mixed-use towers, along with impressive new public spaces and important new pedestrian connections. The design will also restore and revitalise two historic buildings on site and together, the development provides a significant amount of new hotel, office and residential spaces in this downtown neighbourhood.
This development forms part of a rezoning plan, which was put in place to encourage density around the Transbay Terminal, and the project represents the last mixed-use development of this scale in the area. The 605-foot mixed-use residential and hotel tower reflects the scale of San Francisco’s existing tall buildings and has frontage on Mission Street, while the 850-foot tall residential and office tower rises above a new public square as a symbol of this new vertical city quarter. Responsive in urban and environmental terms, the development brings together places to live and work with the city’s most important new transport hub, further evolving a sustainable model of high density, mixed-use development that the practice has always promoted. At ground level, the buildings are open, accessible and transparent – and have been ‘lifted up’ to provide a new ‘urban room’ for the region, with pedestrian routes through the site that will knit the new scheme with the urban grain of the city. The project will have a wide ranging programme of art installations throughout the public spaces, along with landscaping by Kathryn Gustafson.
With an offset service core, the innovative office floor plates are designed to allow tenants a high degree of flexibility. Their open layout is supported by an emblematic orthogonal structural system developed for seismic stability, resulting in a structurally rigid, but lightweight structure. The tower on Mission Street targets LEED Gold, while the office and residential tower has been designed to attain a LEED Platinum rating.
Lead image © Foster + Partners / Heller Manus Architects
2013 - 2019
Comcast Technology Center
Philadelphia, USA
Located next to the existing Comcast Center, the Comcast Technology Center rises 1,121 feet (341 meters) as the city’s tallest building. The Comcast Technology Center is vertically stepped, with loft-like work spaces and state-of-the-art television studios for NBC10 and Telemundo62, with a 12-story Four Seasons Hotel above. At an urban scale, the project is conceived as a welcoming addition to the neighborhood, integrated with its shops, bars and restaurants.
The 1800 Arch Street site is between the residential and social hub of Rittenhouse Square and the cultural district around Benjamin Franklin Parkway. Reflecting Philadelphia’s great civic tradition of public spaces, the base of the building features a sheltered winter garden that foregrounds the main entrance. This ‘urban room’ combines the best elements of a lobby, a plaza and social spaces to create something completely new for residents and visitors of the city, featuring several site-specific works of art such as For Philadelphia by Jenny Holzer and Exploded Paradigm by Conrad Shawcross that animate the space.
The LEED Platinum design takes advantage of the city’s pleasant climate, offering protection from the harsh winters. The building utilizes an active chilled beam system which reduces the energy loads and creates a healthier working environment. The typical floorplate has been designed to optimize and control light levels through efficient glazing with high light transmittance and an automated blind system. Daylight penetrates into the interior spaces through triple height sky gardens. The building also features systems to ensure water efficiency with green roofs, waterless urinals and high-performance cooling towers.
The service core of vertical circulation is split, creating a visual axis through the building to Comcast Center and a clear orientation spine. This central spine is articulated at the top of the building as an illuminated blade of glass, which extends 125 feet (38 meters) high to provide a marker on the skyline. The building’s facades are animated by panoramic glass elevators and a series of thirteen three-story sky gardens, which rise up to draw a continuous strand of active spaces through the building. The large, open floor plates are filled with daylight – each office level is equivalent in scale to twelve tennis courts. The interior is fluid and dynamic, with loft-like, highly flexible spaces designed to allow staff great freedom in choosing where and how and how they work.
Lead image © Nigel Young / Foster + Partners
2013 - 2020
National Bank of Kuwait
Kuwait City, Kuwait
Located on a prominent site in Kuwait City, the 300-metre-high headquarters tower for the National Bank of Kuwait will have a distinctive presence among the high-rise buildings of Sharq, the city’s growing financial district. The design combines structural innovation with a highly efficient passive form, shielding the offices from the extremes of Kuwait’s climate, where temperatures average 40 degrees in the summer months.
The tower’s cylindrical form opens like a shell to the north to avoid solar gain, while revealing views of the Arabian Gulf. The southern façade is shaded by a series of concrete fins, which extend the
full height of the tower to provide structural support. As well as contributing to the environmental strategy, these ribs help to evoke a sense of place in echoing the form of the dhow sailing boat – a reference to the city’s roots in international trade. By tapering towards the base, the design maximises floor space in the upper levels and promotes self-shading, as the overhanging floor plates shelter the offices below. Utilising both passive and active measures to reduce water and energy consumption, the project targets a LEED Gold rating.
The form of the tower is equally driven by the needs of the bank. The spatial arrangement is tailored to the Bank’s organisational structure, while providing the flexibility to anticipate and respond to future change and growth. The crescent form maximises cellular office space at the perimeter, and the tower’s sixty floors are punctuated by three double-height sky lobbies, which provide a social focus and meeting facilities for staff. These communal areas are complemented by the chairman’s club with panoramic city views in the dramatic 18-metre-high volume at the tower’s apex.
Lead image © Nigel Young / Foster + Partners
2012 - 2022
425 Park Avenue
New York, USA
425 Park Avenue is the first full-block office building on New York’s Park Avenue in over 50 years. The building is located alongside Modernist icons such as the Seagram Building, Lever House and the CBS Building, on the world’s grand boulevard of commerce. The 47-story tower includes a triple-height lobby, world-class office accommodation, external green spaces, an expansive social amenity level and a 38-foot-tall penthouse floor. Built to LEED Gold standard, the building has earned Well Core certification at Gold level, in recognition of its features which enhance the health and wellbeing of occupants.
The tower is divided vertically into three distinct volumes: a seven-storey base, knitted into the urban grain at street level; a recessed central section; and a slender formation of premium floors at the top. The design was established through a process of detailed analysis, involving modelling views of Central Park from the site and finding the ideal distribution of areas to achieve a balanced composition.
The first set back – a characteristic feature of high-rise design in New York – corresponds with the datum of the street. The second set back develops this theme, physically and symbolically setting the upper levels apart from the rest of the city’s office towers. To maximise the Park Avenue frontage, the core is placed to the rear, where glazed elevator lobbies bring life to the eastern elevation and reveal long views towards the East River.
Clearly expressing the structure, the tapered steel and concrete framed tower rises to meet three shear walls – extending from the top of the tower, these three blades provide a marker on the skyline. The structural expression of the building allows for truly flexible, column-free floorplates on the upper levels which can accommodate a wide range of tenants.
Lead image © Alan Schindler
2017 - 2025
270 Park Avenue
New York, USA
270 Park Avenue is set to be the new state-of-the-art global headquarters for JPMorgan Chase. The 1,388-foot (423 meter), 60-story skyscraper will be New York City’s largest all-electric tower with net zero operational emissions and exceptional indoor air quality that exceeds the highest standards in sustainability, health and wellness. It will help define the modern workplace with 21st century infrastructure, smart technology and 2.5 million square feet of flexible and collaborative space that can easily adapt to the future of work.
The new building will house up to 14,000 employees – replacing an outdated facility designed in the late 1950s for about 3,500 employees. It will offer 2.5 times more outdoor space on the ground level of Park and Madison Avenues, featuring wider sidewalks and a large public plaza on Madison Avenue with natural green space and other amenities geared toward the residents, workers and visitors who frequent the neighborhood on a daily basis.
The concept for the new design was to create a timeless addition to Park Avenue, which celebrates the city’s iconic architectural history and serves as a powerful new symbol for the next generation of office towers in New York. Using a state-of-the-art structural system to negotiate the site constraints below and at ground level, the innovative fan-column structure and triangular bracing allow the building to touch the ground lightly across the entire block. By lifting the building about 80 feet (24 meters) off the ground, it extends the viewpoint from the Park Avenue entrance through to Madison Avenue. The project also recycled, reused or upcycled 97% of the building materials from the demolition – far exceeding the 75% requirement of the leading green building standard.
Lead image © DBOX for Foster + Partners
Foster + Partners is a global studio for architecture, urbanism and design, rooted in sustainability. Founded in 1967 by Norman Foster, it has a worldwide reputation for integrating architecture with engineering and other allied disciplines to establish an innovative approach to the design of buildings, spaces and cities.
SHVO is a real estate development and investment firm built on the vision of founder and CEO, Michael Shvo, to create culture-defining experiences in iconic properties.