Gabion: Norman Foster, Frank Lloyd Wright and the endless appeal of the supertower. 1/4

(Text © Hugh Pearman. Review of London’s Royal Academy exhibition "Sky High: Vertical Architecture" curated by Lord Foster. First published in The Sunday Times, June 1, 2003. Photo of Ulm Cathedral © Oliver Klaus Graf courtesy of www.structurae.de)

If you’re going to do a show on skyscrapers, there are two ways to go about it. You can present each tower as a totemic object, a crystalline sculpture. Or you can say, nuts to that, let’s pile ‘em in and see how they all get along with each other. Lord Foster, curator of the "Sky High" exhibition at this year’s Royal Academy Summer Show, has chosen the second approach. He has summoned architectural models from the four corners of the world and jumbles them together, cheek by jowl, to make two fantasy cities - East and West.

It’s not a great show, but it’s good, and it will bring an audience other than weekend painters to the RA. Never one to shy away from the grand, simplifying gesture, Foster makes quite a spectacle out of his subject matter, setting his models high on two huge plinths so that you walk between them as through a man-made canyon, carefully lit to enhance the drama. Especially of his own designs, there being several. This is the first time that architecture has been given a special emphasis at the Summer Show, and the Foster approach seemingly caused some head-scratching among the curators, not least the celebrated RA exhibitions director Norman Rosenthal.