Danny Forster
Host of Discovery Channel's "Extreme Engineering"
"Dizzy Heights"












Danny Forster is host of "Extreme Engineering" on the Discovery Channel. As many newspapers and magazines have recounted, Forster got his current job answering an on-line want ad featured on Craig's List while a graduate architecture student at Harvard. An amateur video shot by his girlfriend in his living room (an act of procrastination to avoid finishing essays) was enough to get him to the auditions alongside actors, engineers and weight-lifting models. His enthusiasm for the subject matter and natural good humor (he had been a stand-up comic briefly) beat out the competition. As host Forster has covered several of the planet's biggest building projects: the Arizona Cardinals stadium, Hong Kong's new floating airport, Holland's sea barriers, Boston's Big Dig, the widening of the Panama Canal and American subway systems alongside theoretical schemes including Sky City in Tokyo and the Transatlantic Tunnel. Making these projects accessible as concepts and touring construction sites (despite a stated fear of heights), Danny has had to hone his ability to talk about the built environment, commenting:

...for anyone who has ever suffered through an architectural final review, one of the biggest problems with architects is our inability to say things simply and clearly without obliquely adhering to jargonistic phraseology that is both didactic, pedantic and ideologically vacant, but in TV things need to be clear, simple and said in three sentences or less. If I had a dime for every time the producers said to me, 'that was great, now do it again... just half as long.' [quoted from his on-line interview for Archinect]


In his third successful season he is looking at a megatunnel planned in Kuala Lumpur, the world's largest oil and gas refinery on Russia's Sakhalin Island, the spiraling Space Tower in Madrid and the construction of the $4.5 billion aircraft carrier (the largest ever), the USS George Bush. Danny also checks on the Army Corps of Engineers as part of a program dedicated to the Big Easy Rebuild.

Music in this podcast, "Danny Boy", performed by Men of Worth is used by kind permission of the band.