He is best known as the host of the Science Channel series Build It Bigger; as the creator and executive producer of the Emmy-winning Rising: Rebuilding Ground Zero; and as the principal of DFDS, a New York-based design firm.
Born in Brooklyn, New York, Forster grew up in Tenafly, New Jersey, the son of George, a neurologist, and Alice, a pediatric AIDS and hemophilia clinician.
His master's thesis proposed a vertical urban campus containing both apartments and office space in a post-college collaborative living and working environment.
[8] The show took Forster and a camera crew around the world to investigate pioneering architectural and engineering projects, and put them in cultural, historical, and environmental context.
In six one-hour episodes, filmed over a three-year period, the series chronicles the vast effort to rebuild and reimagine lower Manhattan in the wake of 9/11.
[14] In 2014, Forster was the executive producer and on-screen host of a three-part documentary series for Discovery International called How China Works.
The show examined, among other topics, the expansion of high-speed rail, China's fiscal policy in the face of the 2008 financial crisis, changes in the diet of the middle class, and the government's ambitious space program.
[citation needed] Forster directed a slightly more traditional marketing film for 510 W. 22nd Street,[22] while continuing to focus more on story, context, and atmosphere than on specs.
For the Howard Hughes Corporation, his filmic vision of the future Gateway Towers by Richard Meier helped shift the perception of Honolulu, Hawaii, from a mid-brow tourist haven to an epicenter of high-end architecture and culture.
In 2012, DFDS worked on a 30-story Courtyard by Marriott on the World Trade Center's Southeastern edge, which has been called "a standout even among the starchitecture of Ground Zero"[28] and "will boast a faceted façade that makes the 317-room hotel look like it floats above the National September 11 Memorial.
Since 2006, Forster has lectured nationally and internationally on architecture, education and sustainability to audiences as large as 10,000 and as small as a fifth grade class in Northern New Jersey.
In 2014, Forster delivered a TED talk in Traverse City, Michigan, "Looking vs. Reading: Filmmaking Architecture”[33] and spoke at the 34th annual Future of Education Technology Conference.