Great Modern Buildings: Swiss Re Building, Norman Foster

Great Modern Buildings was a series of supplements in the Guardian to promote sampling among culturally aware readers. The goal was a project that would excite the reader’s imagination and have a perceived value beyond other free giveaway magazines, but was affordable to produce and insert in a daily newspaper. The solution was an oversized magazine in the form of two double-sided posters. A4 covers unfold into enormous pages. Gigantic cover images capture the drama of the buildings, and the centre spreads show original architects’ drawings at the scale of construction blueprints. Other magazine-style pages tell the stories of the buildings and architects. The series raised circulation and enhanced the Guardian’s reputation for powerful visual journalism and great writing.