Alexandra Quantrill

The city in the city – architecture and change in London’s financial district

Planning Perspectives · 2025-06-26

Parcel, Bubble, Shell: The Insular Environment of Finance

Architectural Theory Review · 2022

This article explores how the design of an insurance brokerage for Willis Faber & Dumas by Foster Associates architects meticulously accommodate an increasingly constricted financial sphere. It analyzes links between privatization and delimitation across various scales: from material and spatial implications within the building, to its role in urban development schemes, to the intersection of domestic social and economic policies with international finance. The analysis centers on the local spat…

The Aesthetics of Precision: Environmental Management and Technique in the Architecture of Enclosure, 1946-1986

Columbia Academic Commons (Columbia University) · 2017-01-01

This dissertation explores the paradox of precision in postwar architecture, when dissonant aesthetic desires and concerns regarding environmental regulation forced a reconciliation of material techniques with theoretical accuracy. The modern ideal of exactitude was frequently at odds with the divergent processes of building research, engineering, manufacturing, and environmental management. Suspended within the strata of newly developed curtain walls was a suddenly critical technical and archit…

Review: <i>How Much Does Your Building Weigh, Mr. Foster?</i>, by Norberto Lopez Amado and Carlos Carcas, directors

Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians · 2013-02-26

Norberto Lopez Amado and Carlos Carcas, directors How Much Does Your Building Weigh, Mr. Foster? Art Commissioners in association with Aiete Ariane Films, First Run Features, New York, 2010, DVD, 80 min., $20.96, http://firstrunfeatures.com/ In the years surrounding the 1967 establishment of the Foster Associates office (now Foster + Partners) in London by Norman Foster with his late wife and partner, Wendy Foster, the discourse on systems in architecture gained prominence both in the United Sta…