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January 5, 2014

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Design chief puts his mark on projects around world

Source: Shanghai Daily | January 5, 2014, Sunday | Print Edition

Who is he?

David Nelson shares design responsibility for all projects of the London-based international architectural firm Foster + Partners as joint head of design. He studied three-dimensional design at Loughborough College of Art and Hornsey College of Art, specializing in furniture and industrial design, before getting a master’s degree at the Royal College of Art Environmental Design School. He joined Foster Associates in 1976, and was made a director in 1984. He returned to London and became the director responsible for a wide range of projects, including the American Air Museum at Duxford, Century Tower in Tokyo and many other projects in Asia, Europe, Australia and the United States. Since becoming a partner in 1991, he has worked on many projects including the New German Parliament in the Reichstag, Berlin. He has also overseen a number of transport projects, including Bilbao Metro in Spain, North Greenwich Transport Interchange and Canary Wharf Underground station in London. This year, Foster + Partners has been given an Elle Contemporary Architect Award.

Tell us some of your works and name the one you are most proud of.

Each project of different scales and locations is unique and different. Some projects have greater opportunities toward complex and difficulty, which means you have to use more of your skills and knowledge to bring more things together. For example, the Reichstag building contains lots of layers that challenged us a lot. And currently the Bund Finance Center project is a great opportunity at urban scale that brings in challenges for which we collaborate with Heatherwick Studio. We’ve been focusing on the big scale planning, getting construction details together and we are beginning to focus more on interrelationships between culture, art, commerce and fashion. We try to get the sense of the district in one building.

Are you currently involved with any project?

Aside from the Bund center, we just completed an airport in Jordan, and we’re working on Apple headquarters in California and Bloomberg headquarters in London.

Describe your design style.

The design style is very much related to each individual project. We like to find qualities of location, climate, program, whatever exists and bring everything that we possibly can to make the project relevant to the place and location and at the same time unique and special. Our style is to not have a style and to seek out the essential properties of a situation and a project. In our practice, there is a shared objective and goals between us that allow me to move freely between projects. I spend a lot of time giving support and encouragement to the people who do the work. If you are working on a private house, the architectural role is to bring forward a new idea the owner hadn’t thought about. If it’s a complex scientific building, then we have to try to understand the science in order to be able to provide the right kind of situation for them to work in.

Where are you most creative?

By discussion with people, ideas fly.

What does your home mean to you?

The best interior really mirrors the homeowners. My home reflects a changing family and maintaining familiarity with the past.

Where would you like to go most in Shanghai?

At the moment I love to go to the terrace of the Indigo Hotel to view the sunset of Shanghai.

What will be the next big design trend?

The next big design trend is already emerging — it’s what we call “integrated design.” In the world that we live in, we try to do more with fewer materials, less energy and greater flexibility, and try to respond in the way that human relationships actually work.

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