This is an authorised biography, which suggests a certain intimacy between subject and author. I first met Norman Foster towards the end of the 1970s. He was one of the group of architects and designers that helped to fund the start up of Blueprint magazine which I edited back in 1983. He was one of the three architects in the exhibition that Peter Murray and I curated at the Royal Academy. In 1985, I went to see the Hong Kong and Shanghai bank when it was still a construction site, and got a bad case of vertigo on the construction lift slung to the outside of the scaffolding. In the 1990s, I toured Chep Lap Kok airport among the giant earth diggers, before it was finished. In 2006, I had a chance to wander over the site of Beijing’s new aiport while a 50,000-strong workforce was living there.
Over the years there have been dinners, and rides in his cars. He flew me to Manchester once, and I clearly remember envisaging the whole-page obituary that would ensue for Norman if we crashed, that might include the line, ‘Also in the aircraft at the time was …’.
This was getting close enough to make some assumptions about the man and the architect, but it has only been since I started work on this book that I have been able to test those assumptions.
This is perhaps not so much a biography, but an account of what it is like to be an architect in a time when cities double in size in a decade, new states set out to present themselves to the world through the glossy presumption of their buildings and architecture has never been more global. It is also an attempt to understand what it is that has driven Norman Foster quite so hard.
Writing it depended on a lot of people who were prepared to talk to me about him, some of whom, such as Jan Kaplicky, are sadly no longer alive. Former associates and employees Alan Stanton, Martin Francis and David Chipperfield talked to me about what it was like to work with him. M.J. Long and Su Rogers discussed life at Yale.
The current Foster + Partners team, notably Mouzhan Mujadi, Spencer de Grey and David Nelson, talked to me at length, and nobody was more helpful and knowledgeable than Katy Harris. I am grateful to my agent, Claire Paterson of Janklow & Nesbit, and to Fernando Gutierrez for designing the book.