Danny Forster ’95 thinks it is time to reimagine everything. The Harvard-educated architect heads up Danny Forster & Architecture, which describes itself as “a consortium of architects, designers, urbanists, filmmakers, storytellers, technologists, curators, professors, and authors who value the challenge of innovation over the security of repetition.”
The latest trail-blazing move for the group, whose acclaimed projects include a hotel adjacent to the World Trade Center Complex, is a partnership with the Berkshire Hathaway company MiTek Inc. The joint initiative focuses on modular construction, striving to revolutionize how buildings are made. (Think assembling IKEA furniture or LEGO building, but at a colossal scale.) Since 2018 Danny has been working to bring to fruition the world’s tallest modular-constructed hotel, the 26-story Marriott AC NoMad Hotel in mid-town Manhattan, expected to be complete by the end of the year. The promise of this kind of construction is that the majority of the building is done offsite, saving time, money, and physical space.
If your impression of modular building construction is that it is simplistic or unchallenging from the architectural perspective, you’d be dead wrong, according to Danny. “I actually feel like the work we’re doing with MiTek now is really making me be the architect I’ve always wanted to be,” he said. “I’m really being forced to think holistically and technologically. You don’t get that a lot of that in the profession; you’re pretty deadline driven. What’s changed in my life is that the way I’m thinking about the work that I do is not necessarily solving a given problem for a given client, but we’re trying to solve systemic problems.” This past June, Danny flew to Georgia Tech’s Physical Internet Center to speak with systems engineers to investigate supply chains’ effects on manufacturing facilities for modular construction.
While the architecture world has been quick to construe modular construction as a “disruptor” in the industry, Danny sees it differently. “I hope we don’t disrupt the industry. Actually, I hope we enable the industry,” Danny said. “Our thesis is to take the existing participants: the local general contractors, the architects, the engineers, the manufacturers, and not to disintermediate anybody. Rather try to elevate all of them and enable them with tools, services, solutions, and software.”
Danny credits his success not only to his education but his constant curiosity. This curiosity was on display for five seasons of the Discovery channel’s Build it Bigger, a show Danny hosted and starred in, which gave viewers insight into awe-inspiring construction projects. Danny also produced with Steven Spielberg the Emmy-winning documentary about 9/11 called Rising: Rebuilding Ground Zero.
“I think honoring that curiosity and never getting comfortable in the quotidian has allowed these other opportunities to manifest,” Danny declared. “We’ve had to produce them.”
