Danny Forster

Danny Forster is an Emmy-award-winning producer, an influential speaker and educator, and an internationally recognized architectural designer. His wide-ranging career is unified in his singular ability to teach people to find meaning in buildings, and in his passion for opening their eyes to the built world around them.

Forster's skill as an interpreter of architectural concepts first emerged on television, as the on-screen host and later the producer of the Discovery Channel's award-winning series Build It Bigger. The show brought a camera crew and Forster's curiosity, discernment, and enthusiasm to pioneering construction projects in more than fifty countries. At each site he would go to extreme lengths—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 on top of a twisting skyscraper—to make complex architectural content accessible to a wide audience.

Turning to the genre of long-form documentary, Forster created and directed Rising: Rebuilding Ground Zero, an Emmy Award-winning six-episode series. With Steven Spielberg, his co-executive producer, Forster chronicled the vast effort to rebuild and reimagine lower Manhattan in the wake of 9/11, as well as the human stories behind that effort. Forster is now producing several other projects for film and television, including a television miniseries called How China Works, for which he is both executive producer and host.

Forster teaches a graduate level architecture studio on sustainable design at Harvard's Graduate School of Design (his alma mater) and at the Syracuse University School of Architecture. He lectures internationally about architecture, engineering, and sustainability, and serves as architecture and engineering expert for Discovery Education, a world leader in children's digital educational content.

Forster also practices what he teaches, and he brings to that practice the intellectual dexterity he gained from years of exploring buildings around the world. DANNY FORSTER Design Studio finds ingenious solutions to architectural puzzles large and small. DFDS has designed a 35-story Marriott hotel on the southern edge of World Trade Center Site, a project that broke ground December 2013, and will be completed in early 2016. But it is equally proud of an award-winning LEED-Gold certified lake-house in Omena, Michigan. Back in Manhattan, the firm designed a 300,000 square-foot mixed-use building that will include a new headquarters for the American Bible Society, a museum, and a 180,000 square-foot condominium tower. On a smaller scale: ingenious re-imagining of interior spaces in a Chelsea loft and a Tribeca penthouse.

DFDS will soon participate in the re-imagining of New York City itself. The firm was recently selected to be lead architect for the first AC Hotel by Marriott in North America, which will be located in the transformative and immense redevelopment of the west side of Manhattan: Hudson Yards.