Biography
Danny Forster loves architecture, from the gorgeous curve of a building's roofline to the mathematics at its foundation. But he's passionate about buildings that do more than simply look amazing and stay upright. For Forster, the moment when great architecture happens is when the shape, the structure, the material, the texture, the orientation, even the color of a building all collaborate to become a singular solution to a multitude of problems.
How do you build a modern steel-and-glass hotel that embodies ancient Arab culture and history? How do you build a stable, 3,300-foot cable-stayed bridge in Typhoon Alley? How do you cool a house using only lake breezes?
Forster has built a career out of the ingenious solution: celebrating it as a television host, lecturing about it as a speaker and professor, and finding it himself as a practicing designer. As the host of the Science Channel series Build It Bigger, Forster travels the world with a camera crew in search of incredible feats of architecture and engineering-a record-setting skyscraper, a city-saving levee, a mammoth cruise ship, a state-of-the-art football stadium. At every site he not only pinpoints the ingenious solution at the heart of each structure, but he also makes challenging architectural and engineering concepts clear and compelling. And he often does so by literally going behind the scenes, two miles under a seismic zone in a Peruvian tunnel, landing in a chopper on the back of a top-secret Naval vessel, 1,600 feet in the air installing glass on the outside of a twisting skyscraper. Now in its third season, and one of the highest rated shows on the Science Channel, Build it Bigger captures viewers with Forster's daring, wit, and enthusiasm, and keeps them with his architectural expertise.
Forster first studied architecture as an undergraduate at Wesleyan University, where he received a BA in Architectural History in 1999. After several years in New York City, as a real estate broker and founder of the Internet start-up UrbanFilter, he entered Harvard University's Graduate School of Design. He received his Master's degree in architecture in 2006, and went on to open his own design firm, DANNY FORSTER Design Studio, based in Brooklyn. DFDS specializes in inventive, affordable, sustainable design-the ingenious solution that works with the environment and within a budget.
The studio's first completed project is a LEED Gold certified lake house in Northern Michigan that has been featured in the Architectural Review and Architectural Record. DFDS currently has projects underway in Brooklyn, Manhattan, New Jersey, and Chicago.
Forster's passion for great architecture and his exceptional ability to share that passion have made him a sought-after speaker and a popular teacher. He has delivered keynote addresses at engineering and architecture conferences all over the world. In 2008 he joined the faculty at Harvard's Graduate School of Design, teaching an upper level graduate architecture studio on sustainable design. Syracuse University has asked him to bring the course to its School of Architecture in 2010. Designing pioneering projects for DANNY FORSTER Design Studio, lecturing internationally, and filming for Build It Bigger, Forster is continually at work and on the move creating, explaining, and popularizing ingenious design solutions. He is also at work, closer to home, as creator and executive producer of a documentary series about the rebuilding of Ground Zero. The Rising explores the coming to life of a work of architecture that solves a host of problems-cultural, physical, historical, environmental-within one coherent project. With Forster's singular guidance and exclusive footage, viewers will be able to watch as architects and builders race to finish their enormous undertaking by 9/11/11, the ten-year anniversary of the attacks.
