Danny Forster ’99 just finished filming his first season as host of the Discovery Channel show “Extreme Engineering,” which took him all over the world to visit the sites of exciting design and construction projects.

“The show is very comedy-based,” Forster said. “It’s very much about my experience on the site.”

Before hiring Forster, “Extreme Engineering” had a narrative voice-over rather than a host. By bringing in Forster, the Discovery Channel wants to attract younger viewers and possibly more female viewers to the show.

One episode featuring Forster has already aired on the Discovery Channel. In that episode Forster visits the Arizona Cardinals’ new football stadium and learns about the design of its fabric roof and of its retractable field.

On air, Forster got to swing a hammer, screw nuts onto bolts, and hang out with the workers at the site, who showed him around different parts of the structure in progress. He explained engineering concepts and worked on conquering his fear of heights to visit parts of the site. He also had the chance to meet the project’s architect, Peter Eisenman, who was the subject of Forster’s senior thesis at Wesleyan.

According to Forster, he got the job while procrastinating. He received an e-mail from his girlfriend with an ad she had found on the Internet message board Craigslist.org. The ad invited people to send in a two-minute video clip of themselves explaining why they should host an architecture and engineering show. Forster had performance experience from his two years as a stand-up comic in New York City, and thought he was looking at a rare opportunity.

“There are not that many jobs for stand-up comedian architects anymore,” Forster said.

Forster borrowed a digital camera and shot a clip of himself. He mailed it in not expecting to hear anything, but was called in for screen testing with six other finalists. He got the job, and started right away.

“Once I found out I got the gig, I was on the plane the next week,” Forster said.

He’s been to Malaysia, Russia, and New Orleans, among other places, to film his first season.

“I’m definitely the luckiest guy I know,” Forster said.

The show’s official debut at its regular time on the Discovery Channel will be on Wednesday March 8 at 8 p.m. The show will feature a tunnel project in Kuala Lumpur.

“It will carry both cars and storm water within the same tunnel,” Forster wrote in an e-mail about the upcoming episode. “Basically fixing Malaysia’s traffic and flood issues in one fell swoop—and the amazing thing is, once a year, when Kuala Lumpur gets hit with a massive flood, they will evacuate the cars and flood the entire tunnel with water.”
Adding to the episode’s excitement, Forster said, the construction crew ran into a sinkhole while the “Extreme Engineering” team was on site, and part of the resulting tunnel collapse was caught on camera.

Forster was an art history major at Wesleyan and president of the debate team. After graduating, he moved to New York City and looked for a job.

“Wesleyan is a good place to get really smart and not learn how to do much, so I didn’t know how to do much,” Forster said of his post-graduation experience.

He found work selling real estate, which he stuck with for two years because it paid the bills while he pursued stand-up comedy.

His experience in real estate inspired him to start an Internet company with friends, called Urban Filter. It was designed to link brokers and landlords with recent college graduates, a demographic that often has a hard time in the housing market. They eventually decided to sell the company and Forster moved on to the Harvard Graduate School of Design to study architecture.

Forster took a semester off from his studies to film for the show and returned to Harvard for his final semester. He is working on his thesis, a design for a live-work building for recent college graduates.

“It’s kind of like an urban dorm,” he said.

The building is meant to help young graduates transition more easily and effectively into the housing market.

Forster hopes to continue with architecture in the future rather than pursue a career in television. He does hope the Discovery Channel will ask him back for more “Extreme Engineering.”

“I love it,” Forster said. “It’s super fun.”