Danny Forster
Danny Forster, Architect, Danny Forster & Architecture
Architect. TV host. Producer. Director. Speaker. Professor. Danny Forster is all these things, and through them all he has become a global advocate for architecture. The field of architecture may not appear to need much help: buildings surround us. But that very ubiquity has made it almost invisible; we move in and around buildings but barely notice them. Through his persistent and passionate advocacy, Danny gets people to notice, understand, and value the built environment.
This quest began when Danny was hired, while still pursuing his master’s in architecture at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, to host a television show about impressive feats of construction and engineering. The show would become Build It Bigger, one of Discovery Channel’s most popular series, and ran for nine seasons, during which Danny traveled to more than fifty countries, exploring everything from record-breaking skyscrapers to cutting-edge sports stadiums, from airports to tunnels to impossibly long bridges.
Danny has designed towers at Hudson Yards and Columbus Circle in New York, master plans in Charlotte and Dallas, a five-star resort on the island of Nevis, and the tallest modular hotel in the world. He brings to each project that original sense of limitlessness–as well as with the energy, intensity, and engagement that viewers responded to in his Build It Bigger days.
Danny also speaks all over the world, from the TED stage to the fourth-grade classroom, and produces and hosts TV projects about architecture and culture. How China Works I & II dive deep into the Chinese building boom and subsequent social upheaval; Prefab Nation explores the growing modular building trend; PBS’s Revolutions investigates inventions that transformed worlds.
Since investigating post-Katrina houses a decade ago, Danny has been a committed proponent for modular construction; as an advocate he hopes to get people to discard their preconceived notions of pre-fab and see the potential of modular.
