ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses two architects whose production is most telling in this regard designers who have done as much as any others to design the look of this second modernity, to shape its desire in built form, so to speak: the Englishman Norman Foster and the Italian Renzo Piano. The Crystal Palace was the confident projection of an industrial Britain still on the rise; against the historical odds, Foster attempts a similar projection for a postindustrial Britain, and this might be one reason the head man is embraced. Renzo Piano is not as technocratic as Norman Foster. Indeed, born into a Genoese family of prominent builders, he has long stressed his commitment to craft, and his firm is still called Building Workshop. If modern architecture was the international style, then neo-modern architecture is the global style; like the second modernity that it serves, it often exceeds national containers.
