Norman Foster’s new tower at 270 Park Avenue is a telling marker of how architectural mass has changed its meaning. In the postwar decades, designers like Paul Rudolph, Denys Lasdun, and Gottfried Böhm used weight, structure, and spatial density to embody institutions—universities, professional bodies, parishes—that belonged to the public realm. Their muscular forms carried ethical commitments: to collective life, to civic dignity, to the social contract that defined the mid-century.
Foster’s project, as Christopher Hawthorne notes, embraces a different kind of muscle. Here, bulk is not a social proposition but a corporate signal—an assertion of presence within the skyline economy. The building’s power is expressive but no longer civic; its force is visual rather than communal.
As such, the tower becomes a useful counterpoint to the architecture of the postwar ‚concrete consensus‘. It shows, with striking clarity, how the meaning of mass shifts when it is no longer anchored in a shared future but in the logic of capital and visibility.
Architekt und Architekturhistoriker
Luigi Monzo 