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Foster & Partners to redesign Shakespeare’s Globe

London SE1 website team

Lord Foster's architectural practice has designed a transparent glass rotunda based on Shakespeare's Globe to be erected in New York.

The proposed site for the $78 million (£40.5 million) theatre is at Castle Willams, an artillery fort designed to repel the British, a five-minute ferry ride from Manhattan.

The project is the brainchild of management consultant Dr Barbara Römer, who was inspired after a visit to Bankside: "I was wandering past the Globe and bought a ticket on impulse. Inside I found an energy I'd never seen before in a play," she told The Times.

"I walked up and down the Manhattan waterfront for a year talking to every pier owner and then one day I went to Governors Island."

"The New Globe will fit into the fort like a hand in a glove. Both are circular and three tiers high,"

Lord Foster's design partner David Nelson said: "We have evolved the design talking to actors. There is a feeling that a second Globe should be slightly smaller than the London one. We are proposing a lightweight structure with glass walls allowing the red sandstone of the castle to glow through at night."

Unlike Bankside's replica, the New Globe Theater will require a roof because it will stand under a helicopter flight path.

Last year plans were announced for a replica of the Globe in Berlin. Another Globe replica opened in Rome in 2003, with other reconstructions in the USA and Japan.

Backers of the New Globe Theater include senator Hillary Clinton, Mark Rylance of Bankside's Shakespeare's Globe and Sir Peter Hall.

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