Specialisation has its limits.

PAVILIONS ARE THE FLAVOUR OF THE MONTH IN LONDON, WITH FRANK GEHRY AT THE SERPENTINE GALLERY, AND AROUND THE CITY FOR THE LONDON FESTIVAL OF ARCHITECTURE; UIA CONGRESS IN TURIN; PETER COOK ENGAGES WITH SWEDEN'S 'CHIRPIES' AND 'COMFIES'; AR AWARDS EXHIBITION TRAVELS.

This issue of The Architectural Review is largely devoted to the work of Foster + Partners, in particular their extraordinary Beijing Airport. The practice has made three major contributions to this building type in the last 30 years: Beijing itself. Chek Lap Kok in Hong Kong (AR September 1998), and Stansted in the UK (AR May 1991), where the Foster team cut its airport teeth, so to speak. One could reasonably regard the practice as an airport specialist, but of course it was no such thing when it won that Stansted commission. Similarly, when the practice won the competition to design the Hongkong & Shanghai Bank headquarters, it had never designed anything above three storeys; now, with buildings such as Commerzbank in Frankfurt (AR July 1997), and the so-called 'Gherkin' in the City of London (AR November 2003), Foster's could be regarded as a specialist in tall building design. Having recently completed its first zoo building, in Copenhagen (AR July 2008), similar commissions will no doubt follow. After Wembley, the world of stadium design has opened up.

All this raised an interesting question for Foster + Partners when it contemplated its restructuring two years ago. Given its global scale, unprecedented for a UK practice, one consideration was a division of the practice into geographical interest groups, for example Foster Europe or Foster Asia. Another possibility, perhaps more tempting, was to split the firm into specialist sub-practices: Foster Office, Foster Transport and so on. Why squander knowledge when you could keep it in one team? In the end neither of these options was taken up. Instead, the practice opted for six divisions, each with its own director, which operates as a practice entitled to compete for work anywhere in the world, and dealing with any building type.

That decision represented a triumphant affirmation of the virtues of what is described in the UK as 'general practice', an approach which many commentators, not too long ago, were confidently predicting would disappear. With clients demanding more and more evidence of specialised knowledge, and the risk-averse assuming that you could not design a school, hospital or indeed anything unless you had done several of them before, it indeed seemed that this might happen. But sanity seems to some extent to have been restored. A practice may not have specific experience of a building type, but if necessary it can be bought in; the idea that particular buildings are impossible for a 'genaralist' to understand/undertake is a nonsense. The lesson of the spectacular growth and design successes of Foster + Partners over the past 40 years shows that it is better to know a lot about a lot, than a lot about a little, but that this needs to be underwritten by architectural skill and commitment, without which specialism counts for little.