Foster beached by resort opposition

Is Lord Foster, the architect responsible for the 'Gherkin' in the City of London and the rebuilt Reichstag in Berlin, about to make the biggest mistake of his long and distinguished career? The question has been raised by conservationists who are attempting to block a new Foster-designed, £780m carbon-neutral beach resort on Bulgaria's Black Sea coast, which they claim will ruin the virgin stretches of beach and disrupt irrevocably the area's bio-diversity.

Construction of the Black Sea Gardens project, which Foster and Partners' website describes as "a series of car-free hill towns in an unspoilt setting of oak forests, meadows and river gorges", is due to start next year. Under the plans, 15,000 inhabitants of Sky Village, Wilderness Village, Meadow Village, Cape Village and Sea Village will be encouraged to leave their cars outside the settlements and go by foot, or use pools of electric cars and shuttle buses instead.

Sounds OK, but detractors claim that while the plans might be of a much higher standard than other substandard constructions that hug the Black Sea, the sheer scale of the resort will do lasting damage to the natural habitat. They say the settlements will eat into untouched oak forests, and the invasion of thousands of people and new roads will disturb one of Europe's major migratory routes for millions of birds.

"I ask myself whether Norman Foster really knows what he's getting himself into," says Todor Karastoyanov, the organiser of the protest movement. "We want to try to stop him from making the biggest mistake of his career by building here, because it's immoral and he might not know that."