Comcast Tower Architect Together With Julianna Margulies

Norman Foster’s Marseille Vieux Port Pavilion in France. Photo by Nigel Young for Foster + Partners

February’s issue of Architectural Digest features The Good Wife‘s Julianna Margulies on its cover. You have to imagine this kind of cover probably sells more issues than a cover like this one, but the story is legit: Margulies’ comparatively modest SoHo apartment was designed by Vicente Wolf.

In the same issue, a mere 22 pages away, a pavilion by the chosen architect for the Comcast Innovation and Technology Center is celebrated as one of 10 recently completed projects that represent “the best of the field’s cutting edge…projects that impress and amaze.” Norman Foster’s Marseille Vieux Port Pavilion in France is singled out as distinctive, compelling and a “sublime study in simplicity.”

That structure is actually little more than six pillars supporting a flat stainless steel canopy. But the steel has been burnished to a mirror-like shine so that the people walking underneath are reflected, as is some of the Marseille harbor landscape — the boats, the water. It reminds me of Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate (aka “Bean”) in Chicago’s Millennium Park. Both are made infinitely more complex with human presence and interaction, but are equally — differently — beautiful alone.

TEN DARING NEW BUILDINGS AROUND THE WORLD [Architectural Digest]