The Indonesian site foreman with an ikat headdress under his hard hat blows his whistle to push the tangle of construction workers back out of the way. They look expectantly across the concrete hulk, marooned in the flat, featureless sandscape that blows aimlessly around the outer edges of Abu Dhabi’s airport, in what will one day be the heart of a new township with homes and jobs for 100,000 people. Minutes pass, then a slender, silver bubble glides silently into sight. From the front, its slit eye headlamps, and the rictus grin of its vestigial radiator grille give it the look of a slightly sinister alien species. It approaches, lights gleaming, draws level, and then, as it goes noiselessly on its way, its open doors briefly give a glimpse of the ghostly interior of a vehicle big enough to take four, but without driver or controls. It moves, steered by nothing more tangible than its digital intelligence, guided by invisible sensors buried in the concrete floor, and by counting the wheel revolutions that allow its computers to understand where it is. A single technician sits inside monitoring its performance on his laptop. This is the transport system that is taking shape to serve a new settlement planned by Norman Foster. On an artificial ground level, seven metres above, a network of pedestrian streets with all the usual architectural dreams of umbrella-shaded cafés, shops and apartments is planned. Down here, in the undercroft, will be a fleet of silver bubbles, descended from the prototype that has just slipped by. They will need no tracks, and no drivers, and they will abolish traffic jams and car parks.
There are tower cranes above, spreading out over air-conditioned site huts. Every day 6,000 labourers are bussed in. On the main site, concrete structures have risen eight and ten storeys high on some buildings. They have been herded together so as to create shaded lanes narrow enough to generate a cooling breeze, like a traditional walled city. This is Masdar, the Arab word for source. Construction workers moved on to the site three months after Foster won a competition to do the plan. It is called a city, but that is putting it perhaps too optimistically. Masdar is one of the string of settlements sprouting up between Abu Dhabi and Dubai. What makes Masdar different from what is around it – the airport compound that houses flight crews, next door, the golf course, or the Formula One track – is that this is an experimental laboratory for a world that is waking up to the fear that it might be making itself uninhabitable.
The first phase will include the home of the Masdar Institute of Science and Technology, a research centre dedicated to renewable energies linked to Imperial College London, MIT and New York University. It is being built by the same mix of migrant workers from across Asia that have been drawn to the Gulf over the last decade to build the glittering towers of Dubai, the artificial islands, the indoor ski slopes with real snow, the most extreme form of the architecture of irrational exuberance that evaporated on the day the credit finally ran out. This is a place in which oil is burned to desalinate the water which is used to grow the grass and the trees that fringe the highways: a process that is killing the mangroves that keep the Gulf alive at its choke point at the straits of Hormuz.
Masdar claims that it will be different. It aims to be carbon neutral, recycling all its own waste. Even during construction there are carefully sorted piles of waste stacked in colour-coded pens on the edge of the site. Most of the steel used for its reinforcing rods and structural frames comes from recycled sources. There is a 10-megawatt photovoltaic power station already operational. Later there will be larger solar farms and experimental plantations and attempts to harvest energy from algae blooms. The plan is for the entire area to be free of cars. The shaded streets are intended to encourage walking – no small ambition in the climate of the Gulf, where in August the temperature is a brutal fifty degrees.
In its optimism and its search for answers, Masdar is an echo of the first city of the future that Norman Foster explored with his adolescent imagination growing up in Manchester. Long before he met Buckminster Fuller, he never missed an instalment of Dan Dare: Pilot of the Future. As a young teenager Foster read the comic strip, with its intricate depiction of a world of atomic-powered monorails and levitating taxis (which look a lot like Masdar’s personal rapid transits), every week in the Eagle, the comic aimed at middle-class adolescents in the England of the 1950s. Foster has been thinking about cities ever since.
If you have been fortunate enough to be engaged with so many extraordinary projects, with the passage of time you realise that the issues of sustainability are about density. If you have the luxury of having lived long enough to understand that, you realise that making cities is less about the individual buildings, and much more about the bigger picture. It takes me back to the thesis that I did on city spaces. It’s not a new thing: it goes back to roaming the streets of Manchester.
The view from the front bedroom at 4 Crescent Grove in Levenshulme, a faded suburb washed up on Manchester’s southern limits by the tide of Victorian development, has changed hardly at all since the day more than half a century ago that a twenty-one-year-old Norman Foster took out brush and poster colours to paint it. Neither a crescent nor a grove, Crescent Grove is a short, plain, terraced street just five houses long, caught between the mainline railway from London to Manchester and the road to the south. It looks as if it was built more by accident than as part of any rationally considered plan. Small factories, some workshops and a few yards have been scattered seemingly at random among the terraces of houses that frame Crescent Grove.
What was once Foster’s home is at the end of one of these terraces. Its gable end has been sliced off at an awkward angle and a makeshift back extension tacked to one side. The front door is set inside an arched opening in an attempt at an architectural flourish. Like its neighbours, it has the bay window and front garden that serve to distinguish it from the slightly humbler houses in the surrounding streets. The moulded clay tiles around the eaves give it a vaguely gothic flavour, but not in a way that would have gladdened John Ruskin’s heart. There is a modest walled yard at the back of the house that once had enough space for a coal shed and an outdoor privy. Beyond is the alley demanded by nineteenth-century health regulations. It was meant to be the route for the bin men who came every week to collect refuse. In fact it was universally used as the way into the house, opening directly into the kitchen. The front door was for special occasions only: funerals, Christmas, and visits from the doctor. Beyond the alley is the railway, hoisted up on an embankment. When Foster was sitting drawing at the table in his tiny bedroom, it was at eye level.
The house is still fragile enough to shake every time a train goes by. In the 1950s it was the soot-black steam locomotives of the state-owned British Railways that were doing the shaking as they hauled the passenger trains past Crescent Grove, spitting smoke, fire and cinders along the way. There is nothing quite so elemental to see now, just the wires of the overhead electric power lines, and the silvery grey skin of the Virgin Pendolino blasting past four times every hour.
Crescent Grove is unmistakably on the wrong side of the tracks. Duck down under the railway embankment, penetrated by an underpass finished a century and a half ago by the London & North Western Railway’s engineers in hard purple engineering brick of infinitely better quality than anything that Levenshulme’s penny-pinching housebuilders ever invested in, and you find yourself in an altogether primmer kind of suburbia than the rest of Levenshulme.
When I tell Foster that I have been to see the house that was once his home, he reaches for his pencil with his left hand and, without pausing, reproduces in his notebook exactly what I have seen for myself. More than twenty years after he was last there, he deftly delineates a blackened arch burrowing under the tracks like a mousehole. Five ill-assorted bollards of various sizes and shapes stand in the way to stop vehicles driving through. Unprompted, he scrawls a sentence that had already occurred to me: ‘The tracks that divide one world from another.’
Foster’s drawing gives a glimpse of the half-timbered early twentieth-century houses that I saw on the other side of the arch. They are relatively substantial and sit on wide, tree-lined streets, even if they look as though they have come down in the world a bit. To the other side of Crescent Grove lies Stockport Road, the main route which comes spooling out of the southside of Manchester, crawling through Longsight, and into Levenshulme. It is a continuous strip of Edwardian banks, pubs and shopping parades that have also seen better days. Beyond them are mosques, and Pakistani community centres.
A madrassa has slipped into the gap between the two-up, two-down houses of Prince Albert Avenue, where Foster’s grandmother once lived, and the Crescent behind it. The Topkapi Turkish restaurant offers its customers an outdoor terrace with hookah pipes, while the old Palace Cinema on Farm Place is now the Al Waasi banqueting hall with an all-you-can-eat buffet at £5 a head. Back in the days when he was a student, Foster’s mother got him a job next door in Robinson’s bakery.
It was in Levenshulme in 2007 that a Shi’a preacher forced two local boys, aged thirteen and fifteen, to flagellate themselves with a ritual five-bladed rope and was subsequently convicted of child abuse. Norman Foster, meanwhile, has been invited by King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz Al Saud, guardian of the two most holy sites of Islam, to discuss restructuring the approaches to Mecca.
Levenshulme is a place built mostly of harsh red brick, with the occasional ladylike neo-Georgian bank made up in faience and cream. One such specimen, formerly Martins Bank and now Barclays, sits opposite the Farmer’s Inn around the corner from Crescent Grove.
The terraces on either side of Crescent Grove have been thinned out in an attempt to make it look like a place that people might want to live, rather than an essential but ultimately somewhat regrettable by-product of the Industrial Revolution. Foster describes the process that has reshaped Levenshulme since the time that he lived there as gentrification, but that is hardly the right word. There are still a few people here who say that they have lived in the area since they knew Foster as a child. They live alongside the occasional art student or folk musician and a vigorous community of migrants from Pakistan, along with their descendants. All of them have the electricity and the bathrooms that were luxuries during Foster’s childhood, yet this still isn’t a desirable address. A few streets in the area do show the occasional flash of architectural ambition. Some have a round arched doorway picked out in clay tiles. Others deploy a keystone or two, and some have decorated roof ridges. But the materials that were used to build them were so cheap that the pitted surface of the clay brick used widely throughout Levenshulme looks as if it has been peeled raw by some particularly aggressive skin disease over the years.
The original front doors and window frames have rotted away, to be replaced by flush panel hardboard and aluminium. There are telegraph poles at the street corners from which overhead telephone lines radiate like anorexic maypoles. The Crescent Grove of today, hemmed in by the railway, with McCosken’s builder’s yard immediately to the west of Foster’s old house, and a scrap yard, is still recognisably the product of the provincial England of Foster’s youth. It belongs to a country of granite cobbled city streets, of trams and trolley buses with conductors in barathea blazers and celluloid peaked caps, of concrete cooling towers, canals and factory chimneys, of smogs and dance halls.
Even when Foster was a pale young adolescent, it was already a world overshadowed by signs of an aggressive modernity. Manchester’s boundaries were defined for him by his bicycle rides into Derbyshire and Cheshire. He pedalled all the way to the Lake District, and back: 130 miles in a single day. He went south to Jodrell Bank to see the Lovell steerable radio telescope when it was unveiled in 1957. In the British context it was as startling a vision of the future as the final assembly building of Cape Canaveral was for America.
Sitting in his bedroom in 1955, Foster was working on a set of drawings for the portfolio that would propel him out of Levenshulme for good. He needed them to apply for a place on the architecture course at Manchester University as a mature student. His drawings were inspired in equal parts by the industrial landscapes of L.S. Lowry and the cutaway drawings of the aircraft carriers and delta-winged Vulcan bombers that filled the china-clay-coated photogravure-printed centre pages of the Eagle.
Half a century later, Foster has one of Lowry’s paintings hanging on his wall. It’s a gift from his wife, Elena. It shows a landscape not so different from the one that Foster would have seen from his window: the unforgiving industrial Manchester of the 1930s. Until the day that he retired as chief cashier of the Pall Mall Property Company, Lowry would personally tour those streets collecting rents on behalf of his employer.
The Eagle was essential weekly reading for adolescent boys from aspirational families in the 1950s. It was started by Marcus Morris, a Methodist minister from Lancashire, who was worried both about the morale-sapping effect of what he saw as dubious imported American comics, and the home-grown anarchy of the Beano. There was a strong religious streak to the Eagle, exemplified by a long-running strip outlining the life of Jesus. But far from providing a bulwark against the permissive society of the 1960s, which was already gathering momentum, the Eagle had the unintended and entirely unexpected consequence of breeding a generation of high-tech architects. This was certainly true in Foster’s case; the Eagle offered both a refuge from his isolation as an only child and an introduction to contemporary architecture.
The cover of each issue featured the unmistakable lantern jaw and improbable eyebrows of Dan Dare. Against a backdrop of monorails running down the middle of the Thames and space ports that faithfully reproduced late-period Frank Lloyd Wright urbanism, the hero of Frank Hampson’s science-fiction strip – armed with little more than pluck and a self-sealing space suit – would engage in weekly battle with the evil Mekon and his green-complexioned Treen followers. The Eagle’s centre spread was always devoted to an intricate cutaway drawing that would lay out the complexities of one engineering triumph after another. In 1951, the magazine published an exploded view of the Dome of Discovery, built for the Festival of Britain, designed by ‘the young British architect’ Ralph Tubbs. This was the closest that Foster ever got to actually seeing the Festival for himself – it had been demolished by the time that he finally reached London. A rallying point for the generation of architects and designers who worked on its various pavilions, the Festival marked the first occasion that contemporary architecture got a real audience in Britain. In a later issue, the Eagle showed another key British building of the 1950s, Basil Spence’s design for Coventry Cathedral, describing it as ‘The Cathedral of the Space Age’.
To the impressionable young, the Eagle was highly effective propaganda, not just for modern architecture but for technology. There were images of nuclear-powered ships and gas turbine-engined cars that the Eagle predicted would be the personal transport of the very near future. As portrayed by the Eagle’s artists, these vehicles bear a close resemblance to Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion car, shaped like tear drops and driven on three invisible wheels. The cities of the future were going to look like modular collections of pods. One issue had a cutaway drawing of an American Antarctic base that had been clipped together from a series of units half-buried in snow and ice. Ten years later, that drawing would not have been out of place on the pages of an avant-garde architectural magazine.
Foster was, and still is, charmed by these images. Both by the look of the drawings, that in his eyes are artworks in their own right, and by the insight into the world of design that they offered. Studying those carefully rendered images that sliced away the layers of the fuselage to show the underlying geodesic structure of a Wellington bomber, designed to be tough enough to survive a direct hit in the air, or that laid bare the construction techniques used to build the Forth Railway Bridge, it’s easy to see why they would have ignited a spark of curiosity in the mind of a young James Dyson or a Norman Foster about the way the world worked.
Years later, Foster tracked down John Batchelor, the artist responsible for some of the later cutaways, and asked him to make a drawing to analyse the vivid yellow steel masts that he had designed to support the roof of the Renault parts warehouse that he built outside Swindon. Despite their charm, these cutaways seem to lack the authority of the cross-section through a Cunarder that Le Corbusier cited as a precedent for his apartment slab in Marseilles, the Unité d’Habitation. As a source of inspiration, anonymous popular culture is one thing, but the kind of imagery that has never entirely succeeded in escaping beyond the tastes of adolescent males is quite another. Frank Lloyd Wright admitted to having played with Froebel blocks as a child, and acknowledged their impact on his architecture. Roy Lichtenstein’s transfiguration of the conventions of the American comic strips changed the direction of contemporary art in the 1960s. But few architects have the innocence to admit that their eyes to the modern world were opened by the most wide-eyed kind of science fiction in the way that Foster does.
Number 4 Crescent Grove was the house to which Norman Robert Foster, the only child of Robert and Lillian Foster, moved shortly after his birth in Reddish, near Stockport on 1 June 1935. Foster’s parents had married two years earlier, in 1933, at St Luke’s Church in Levenshulme. His mother’s maiden name was Smith. She was twenty-seven at the time of their marriage, Foster’s father was thirty-three.
Foster has no recollection of Reddish; but when he was introduced into the House of Lords as a life peer in the summer of 1999, by Lord Weidenfeld and Lord Sainsbury, taking the title Baron Foster of Thames Bank, he was described in Hansard as ‘of Reddish in the county of Greater Manchester’. The crest that Foster later adopted has at the centre of its shield a stepped geometric tower, a heraldic abstraction of the structure of the Millennium Bridge, flanked by a pair of herons.
Foster’s parents paid fourteen shillings a week to rent the tiny house in Crescent Grove. His paternal grandparents, his uncle and his two aunts, as well as his cousins, all lived within a few streets of each other. His mother’s family had come from Ardwick, regarded as a cut below Levenshulme in the carefully graduated hierarchy of Manchester’s gritty urban hinterland. Despite the aspirational and suburban tone of its name, in the days when Foster lived there Crescent Grove was the kind of place where doorsteps were washed down daily, and debt collectors called, L.S. Lowry style, once a week. His mother would trade old clothes with the rag-and-bone man for a branded cleaning product known as Donkey Stone. It was made from pulverised stone mixed with bleaching powder and cement. Every week she used it to whiten her doorstep, as much in a conspicuous display of respectability as for any ostensibly hygienic purpose. On her hands and knees she would scrub the stone threshold clean. Foster got into trouble if he scuffed or marked it. Throughout his early childhood, bathing for Foster meant a once-a-week immersion in the kitchen in a galvanised zinc tub.
The floral wallpaper in the front parlour at No. 4 was permanently damp. There was a gas meter in the corner that needed to be constantly fed with shillings to keep the cooker in the kitchen alight. In the living room, where the only source of heat was the fireplace, a radiogram stood next to a damp patch on the wall, poised to pick up the Light Programme of the BBC as well as Radio Hilversum and Luxembourg. It was Foster’s job to move the radiogram away from the wall when it stopped working, and to twist a loose valve, a procedure that left him vulnerable to the occasional electric shock.
There was no telephone in the Foster house, the nearest was in a cast-iron box just outside the Methodist church on the Stockport Road, five minutes’ walk away. There were no books bar his textbooks and, apart from the Manchester Evening News and Foster’s weekly copy of the Eagle, not much in the way of newspapers. Almost everybody in the neighbourhood left school as soon as they could, which in those days was at the age of fourteen. When he finally got to university, Foster would find himself buttonholed in the street by neighbours who, for the most part, regarded him as some kind of idler, still sponging off his parents in his twenties.
The next-door neighbours had a son, Sam Bradley. He chased after me one day, stopped me and said, ‘Look at my hands, they are so different from yours. I am working, you aren’t, so why don’t you get a proper job?’
I had been severely bullied by other boys in the area. But Sam didn’t touch me. He just couldn’t understand what I was doing at the university.
In Foster’s memory, his was not a close-knit family, even if there were grandparents, uncles, aunts and cousins living just a few yards away from his Donkey-Stoned front doorstep. There were resentments and divisions among the Fosters. Some things were left unsaid within the family. His aunt Nettie’s husband, for one, was seldom spoken of. ‘I think he may have been a deserter in World War Two, but it was never spelled out,’ says Foster. Foster feels he never knew enough about his mother. ‘I was always curious about her. I am almost certain that she had been adopted as a baby. Her name was Smith, but the man I knew as her brother was called Beckett. She was very beautiful, and in her looks she had a Mediterranean quality.’
Grandmother Rosa Foster had a house a short walk away on Prince Albert Avenue, which she and Foster’s grandfather William shared with his uncle. One of his father’s sisters, Kate, lived a few doors down, on the same road. The lamplighters would knock on the door every morning to wake her, as they put out the gas streetlights. She had a daughter, Edna. His father’s other sister, Ethel, lived on the far side of the Stockport Road. After Foster’s parents died, his aunt Ethel wrote to him, asking for his help. Her own house was threatened with demolition to make way for a slum-clearance scheme, so could Norman perhaps find a way to help her stay in the neighbourhood? He responded quickly and bought the house at 6 Crescent Grove, next to the one that his parents had lived in, for her.
He remembers his grandparents’ house as always being dark. It was still lit by gas, even after the war. The two old people used to sit in the gloom, in matching chairs on either side of the fireplace. In Foster’s eyes, his grandmother did not treat his mother well. When Foster’s father was rushed into hospital, desperately ill, one Christmas towards the end of the war, Lillian was left to fend for herself. Her sister-in-law pointedly took Norman’s cousins into Manchester to see Father Christmas in a department store, but left him at home.
In fact, life was not always so bleak. There were shared family holidays, sometimes taken in North Wales, sometimes in Blackpool, with his uncles and aunts and his cousins. One summer they all went to Norbreck, just outside Blackpool, to stay in a bed and breakfast. Foster remembers asking his mother about the two black lines on the shirt that his uncle wore at breakfast. She told him, ‘When he washes, he turns his shirt inside out, and the water leaves a mark.’ In the Levenshulme of his childhood Foster remembers that most people could not afford more than a few items of clothing. ‘Those that they had would be slept in.’ It’s a significant memory, given the close relationship between hygiene and modern architecture’s missionary impulses. In Levenshulme’s Free Library, Foster had discovered Le Corbusier. Imagine the impact on the fastidious boy from Crescent Grove, after coming back from Blackpool and the sight of his uncle’s shirt, of Vers une architecture’s messianic prescriptions for the life hygienic.
Demand a bathroom looking south. One of the largest rooms in the house, the old drawing room, for instance. One wall to be entirely glazed, opening if possible on to a balcony for sun baths, the most up-to-date fittings with a shower bath and gymnastic appliances. An adjoining room to be a dressing room, in which you can dress and undress. Never undress in your bedroom. It is not a clean thing to do and makes the room horribly untidy. Teach your children that a house is only habitable when it is full of light and air and when the floors and walls are clear.
Foster may have felt that he was an isolated only child. But he remembers Levenshulme as a close community. It was a place in which he knew all that there was to know about his neighbours. Stockport Road offered the consolations of relatively prosperous Northern working-class life. There were fish suppers seasoned with salt and vinegar, wrapped in newspaper with mushy peas to be had from the local chip shop; regular customers would be treated to free scraps of batter. Further along the road, in Longsight, was the pool hall in which Foster occasionally played billiards with his father. Then there was Robinson’s Café in Levenshulme, where his mother worked much later as a waitress. The UCP shop – the initials stood for Universal Cow Products – sold tripe from a marble-topped slab in an interior gilded with brass and embellished with mahogany. And in Poplar Villas, just round the corner from the Fosters, there was a school of ballroom dancing.
The people who lived in Levenshulme ranged from relatively prosperous small businessmen to men who, like the father of Norman’s schoolfriend Ronnie Deakin, could only find menial work after the war. Deakin’s father was a dustman; ‘My mother was very disparaging about him,’ Foster remembers. The Lip-trotts, at the end of Crescent Grove, had a garage business. In his student days, Foster worked there as a part-time mechanic in its oil-stained inspection pit, getting filthy in the process. Alan Liptrott would go home from the garage to listen to Schubert. The Streets across the way owned a removals firm that had a yard next to the house. On the other side of Crescent Grove in Poplar Villas lived Mrs Flood; although bedridden and known to be of a nervous disposition, she was nevertheless an accomplished watercolourist.
Foster’s parents were certainly not well off. After the war, his father worked as a labourer at Metropolitan Vickers in Trafford Park to keep his family together. He put in long hours, and had to rely on a succession of buses to get across Manchester. But when Norman was born his father was managing a pawnshop in Eccles, driving to work from the first family home in Reddish in a Jowett van, a distinction that suggests a certain level of entrepreneurial ambition, even if the exorbitant rates of interest that his shop charged would not have endeared him to some of his customers. In his retirement, Robert Foster cut an elegant figure, stylishly dressed in a single-breasted suit, with a slim knot in his tie, and mirror-finished shoes. Foster’s mother was a fine-featured, elegant woman. His parents made a striking couple.
Robert and Lillian were constantly struggling to make something of themselves, but as time went on they were slipping down the ladder of social status rather than making their way up it. Foster calls his family working class. In fact, in the infinite gradations of class with which the British delineate themselves, the Fosters were more aspirational that that. They belonged to that nebulous territory at the point where the upper working class starts to shade into the lower middle class. Even if they were less successful than some of their neighbours, they had accepted the challenge of living life measured by a set of expectations framed by others. They worked hard. They saved because they wanted to provide for Foster’s education, and because they dreamed of being able to run a small business. It would have allowed them to achieve the same step up that some of the family had already taken. One of Foster’s uncles ran a bakery, and another, Sid Beckett, had a butcher’s shop. Sid and his wife, Bertha, lived in a semi-detached house in Chorlton-cum-Hardy in what seemed to the Fosters unimaginable affluence. Sid had a piano which his daughter played cautiously, and paid for violin lessons for Norman’s reluctant cousin Lionel.
Foster remembers his parents taking him to see a small shop that they were thinking of buying, accompanied by an estate agent. But none of their plans to start their own business came to anything. As a teenager he became acutely aware of their frustrated ambitions and their limited horizons. Later it was what drove him to escape the world of Crescent Grove. They had failed in what they had wanted to do with their lives. He was not going to do the same.
The Levenshulme Free Library where the young Foster would retreat from his damp living room, and from the school bullies, to escape from the claustrophobia of his parents’ home still exists. Turn right out of Crescent Grove, and right again on to Stockport Road, go one hundred yards south, past the Farmers Arms, the United Reformed Church, and the Union Inn, Erected AD 1923, and turn right on to Cromwell Grove. The redbrick gables of the library and its hammer-beam roof suggest a manor house trapped in the bleak streets of south Manchester, which can be seen spreading endlessly to the horizon. It is a kind of civic oasis, next to the Chapel Street Primary School, and opposite the prim municipal baths and public washhouse built in a chilly neo-Georgian style, like the Levenshulme post office on the other side of Stockport Road. The twin entrance doors to the baths, raised up on flights of steps, are both topped by a keystone incised with a single, brutally impersonal word. ‘Males’ on the left and ‘Females’, under polite sash windows, on the right.
If the young Foster had looked up at the moulded clay garland over the library door as he went in, he would have seen a representation of a set square and a protractor incised within it. It was here, in a building paid for by Victorian philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, that Foster began to discover the meaning of architecture in Le Corbusier’s Vers une architecture. In the early part of 2008, the many hours that he had spent in Levenshulme’s library were put to good use when Foster + Partners won a highly visible commission for remodelling the New York Public Library’s historic main building on Fifth Avenue. The same Andrew Carnegie who had established the Free Library of Foster’s youth had set up the foundation that financed the construction and fitting out of thirty-seven local libraries in New York, in the hope that the poor but gifted and ambitious might do something to redress the disadvantages of birth, upbringing and lack of education. Foster told the Americans, perfectly correctly, that he himself had once been exactly the kind of person that the libraries in New York were setting out to reach.
Today, Levenshulme library is struggling to dissipate the musty air that comes from housing thousands of books wrapped in yellowing clear plastic, worn thin by the pressure of countless fingers. In its efforts to modernise itself, the library seems intent on ruthlessly limiting the intellectual challenge of the books on its shelves. On his return in 2009, Foster was left saddened and depressed by the lack of books of real substance.
Foster’s most vivid memories of his childhood are of his mother, rather than his father. When the war came, his father, who had been rendered unfit for active service by his injuries in the war of 1914–18, left the pawnshop he had been managing in Eccles to become a guard at Fairey Aviation, an aircraft factory at Heaton Chapel, outside Stockport, that was building Fulmar fighters for the aircraft carriers of the Royal Navy’s Fleet Air Arm. For a while, Lilly Foster took over her husband’s old job at the pawnshop. It involved her taking an eight-mile journey, first by tram to the centre of Manchester, and then on by bus to Eccles. In her absence, five-year-old Norman was looked after by family and neighbours in Crescent Grove. As he once said, ‘My parents worked and worked and worked … they worked so hard that I wasn’t really able to get to know them.’
The war as it was fought in the skies over Manchester was the source of both fascination and terror for Foster. Except for a short period when he was evacuated to rural Alderly Edge in Cheshire with his mother, Foster spent World War Two in Crescent Grove. He experienced a curious mix of fear provoked by the random violence of the air war and a spellbound wonder at its glamorous-looking artefacts. Aircraft, weaponry and uniforms intrigued him. Night after night in 1940 and 1941 Manchester’s sky was crowded with hostile aircraft. The sound of their grinding propeller engines punctuated by explosions was all-pervasive as Germany did its utmost to destroy Britain’s industrial base. Lit up by searchlights and shell-bursts, the images of his wartime childhood have merged in Foster’s imagination with what he saw later in the art that dramatised and even aestheticised the technology of modern war. He has a vivid memory of walking past the park next to the library, holding his mother’s hand and looking through the railings at the wreck of a crashed fighter, its nose buried in the ground, the huge identifying roundels painted on its hull clearly visible. As he describes it, the wreckage was like a sculptural installation. It was a fragment of something alien that had hurtled out of the sky and wedged itself into the landscape. But though the image of this battered and twisted object is burned so vividly in Foster’s consciousness that he cannot get it out of his mind, he confesses that he is unsure whether it is a memory that is real or imagined. ‘I still don’t know if there is an element of fantasy, or whether I actually saw it,’ he says. ‘I believe that I did really see it, but it seems such an improbable image. It could be the result of a memory of seeing one of those wartime paintings of Paul Nash much later. Or it could really have been something that I saw one morning on the way to school.’ In fact, Levenshulme did experience at least one wartime plane crash. For Foster it was the unexpected close-up of a flying machine brought to earth, the functional beauty of a shattered propeller blade and the stark contemporary heraldry of the roundel that identified friend from foe, that imprinted itself on his mind, not the lacerated and broken remains of a machine in which a young pilot was burned to death.
The horror of warfare and the helplessness of its civilian victims is as vivid in Foster’s memory as his fascination with its technology:
I remember waking up during an air raid once in my mother’s arms in the communal shelter and hearing bombers go over in the middle of the night. I remember talking rationally about what kind of bomber it might be and then just breaking down into a flood of tears. I remember being absolutely and abjectly terrified.
I was very protected. I didn’t suffer, I wasn’t on the front line. I wasn’t in central Europe, which was invaded, so in that sense the fact that I could be so terror-stricken in a relatively protected environment was a measure of how relatively well off we were. The next day, we would see the wreckage, though you wouldn’t know at that early age the real terror that it represented. I remember picking up bits of metal the day after a raid and not really making the connection about what shrapnel was, just of finding these pieces that seemed so interesting.
This was a world before television. Foster saw the concentration camps, and the entry of Allied troops into Auschwitz, as a ten-year-old schoolboy, watching the Pathé newsreel at the Palace Cinema before the main feature.
The terror of the night raids aside, for Foster the privations of war mostly took a mundane form in Manchester. He was with his mother in the grocer’s shop when dried eggs became available for the first time. Lilly Foster struggled to make sense of the concept, and had to ask several times, ‘How do you prepare it? How do you cook it?’ before going home to put the powder to the test. His own memories are of a distinctly tactile, material kind; to this day he can recall that the box the egg powder came in was made of brown cardboard, and that it had been oiled in some way, which made it slightly moist to the touch. He can also recall helping his mother with routine housework. When she did the weekly wash Foster would be with her, turning the handle of the mangle to squeeze water out from the blankets.
Unusually for the time and place, his parents were able to send him to a private school. In 1941 he was enrolled at Dymsdale School, housed in a double-fronted detached Victorian villa on the other side of the tracks from Crescent Grove. In peacetime a girls-only private school, during the war Dymsdale took in boys as well. It may have been private, but it was not ambitious enough to give its pupils the chance to sit the newly introduced eleven-plus examination – the great class barrier of the British educational system – on its own premises. Instead, Foster had to catch the bus into the city centre. He secured a pass, thanks to the vividness of the essay he wrote as part of the exam. With nothing more than the images on the cigarette cards he was collecting to inspire him, he described the duel between silver Auto Unions and white Mercedes Benz racing cars on the Nürburgring during the late 1930s. The images of those cars have remained with him ever since.
His success in the eleven-plus won him a place at Burnage High School. After Foster left, the high school became a grammar, and then, much later, it was turned into a comprehensive. In this latter incarnation, in the early 1990s, the school was the scene of a fatal stabbing; Foster was shocked to learn that an Asian pupil had been knifed to death in the playground. Today Burnage is once more in the process of being rebuilt, this time as a college specialising in media and the arts.
In Foster’s day, there were prefects to ensure that boys wore the school cap, with its silver-and-black badge, on their way in through the school gates. Among the successful graduates was Roland Smith, who went on to become the head of British Aerospace.
Academically, Foster was good at mathematics, but his favourite subject was art, which, in addition to drawing and painting, involved learning a basic history of architecture. It focused chiefly on castles and cathedrals. Modernism did not figure much, however Foster does still have the copy of Frederick Gibberd’s The Architecture of England: from Norman times to the present day that he took home from his classroom. His art master, Mr Beetham, was the only teacher in his grammar school to take any interest in Foster.
There is a photograph, taken in Foster’s last year, of the thirty-two pupils who made up the school’s fifth form. Foster sits in the front row, looking acutely uncomfortable in his grey flannels. While the rest of the schoolboys in that row sit with their hands clasped in their laps, Foster alone has his hands pressed anxiously down on his knees, as if he is poised to leap up and try to escape. Throughout his time at Burnage, Foster suffered from a sense that he was an outsider. At his first school, Foster had been the only boy from a working-class background. At Burnage he found himself doubly out of place: he was the only boy who had been to a private school, and yet he was the son of a manual labourer (his father was by this time working as a painter in a factory). Though the school was situated in a modern part of Manchester, surrounded by solid, comfortable-looking houses that made Crescent Grove look like a throwback to a grim nineteenth-century past, it proved to be an environment in which Foster did not feel comfortable or happy.
To make matters worse, Foster did not enjoy physical education or participation in any of the sports on offer at Burnage. His previous school had provided no opportunity for boys to learn how to play team sports. He remembers the acute embarrassment that he suffered at Burnage the first and only time that he was asked to hold a cricket bat: ‘I had it the wrong way around, with the sharp pointed side toward the front. I never recovered from the mirth around me that provoked.’ The misery of team games helped him to become highly skilled at forging his father’s handwriting to produce the letters to his form master that were required to get him excused from games. These letters took the form of an infinite number of variations on the same basic message: Please accept my genuine apologies … please excuse my son … yours faithfully R. Foster.
Later in life, Foster became a serial marathon runner and a cross-country skier, two essentially solitary sports that wiped out those memories of school. He is also a committed cyclist, covering the most gruelling rides every year, hurling himself fearlessly, even recklessly downhill in the Alps and the Pyrenees. The passion for cycling began at an early age: there is a photograph of him on a tricycle as a toddler. From the time he learned to ride a two-wheel bike, at fourteen, bicycles were very important him. Foster has vivid memories of customising a high-performance racing bike, taking care to choose the best components that he could afford, to get the colour of the tubular steel frame exactly right, and to take off visually intrusive brand-name stickers. A committed member of the Thame Valley Road Racing Cycle Club, he often took part in its seventy-five-mile weekend rides.
When he wasn’t on his bicycle, Foster retreated into the self-sufficient solitude of books, model aircraft, drawing and watching the trains go by at Crescent Grove. If the wind was in the right direction, it would briefly envelope Foster’s house in smoke and steam.
I used to stand for hours, next to the line, waiting to see the names on the engines. Every locomotive, from the humble Thomas the Tank Engine-style goods engines to the sleek express locomotives, was listed in the train spotters’ guides published by Ian Allan on shiny cream paper. I remember waiting for ages, getting more and more despondent as countless goods trains came and went but never a ‘namer’. Then in an almighty flash one of these express trains would explode into view. I had only a split second to grasp the name, and then I would leave in high spirits.
Foster enjoyed making models, and was fascinated by model aircraft and trains. He spent his pocket money on Trix construction kits and Meccano sets, building up models by painstakingly bolting together complex structures assembled from the girders and plates of the system. He recalls pushing the limits of what the manufacturer envisaged was possible by bolting an entire crane to the winding shank of the blue clockwork motor so that, as it unwound, the boom slowly traversed a complete circle. And he was continually drawn by the magic of the Bassett-Lowke shop in Cross Street, with its displays of precision-made miniature locomotives. Foster would make special expeditions by tram to the centre of Manchester to gaze at its window display for a glimpse of brass connecting rods and tiny lathe-turned smoke stacks.
Foster was no more than seven when he made his first seriously considered design. It was a drawing for an imaginary single-seater aircraft, based on the only technology for a flying craft of which Foster had first-hand knowledge: a model powered by a twisted rubber band. When adapted to the task of carrying a human pilot it took on a Herculean scale. It had high wings, and a ribbed structure. Foster drew himself in the cockpit, a remote-looking figure, isolated high above the ground with the joystick gripped in his right hand, and the lever ready to unleash several kilometres of the tightly wound rubber needed to power his huge craft to reach take-off speed. He quickly progressed from rubber bands to the unimaginable luxury of a carbon dioxide engine. It cost him a guinea, a sum that took him months to accumulate. The experience taught him a number of lessons, not least that the fuel for this particular engine came in the shape of a gas cartridge that was not only extremely expensive, at half a crown a time, but was also so heavy that it defeated every aircraft that he designed to use it. Eventually he was able to afford tiny diesel engines with exotic names – the Frog 100 and the EDBee – which powered more successful designs.
Foster was regarded as a bright pupil. He was in the A stream, the elite who would normally have been expected to stay at school until they were eighteen, and even go on to university. But though he got seven O-levels he unexpectedly failed both his French and Divinity papers. In a more affluent home, this would not have put an end to the idea of staying on at school, or higher education. But for Foster’s parents, the failure was seen as a signal that it was time he started work. He was sixteen by this time; two years older than the vast majority of school leavers of his generation, but two years younger than the middle-class teenagers who stayed at school to take the advanced or A-level general certificate of education examinations.
While he was doing his O-levels, Foster’s father got him to take the entrance exam for Manchester Town Hall’s trainee scheme. He passed and his parents were delighted when he started work there in 1951 in the Treasurer’s Department, but it was a job he had taken to please them, rather than from choice. From the beginning he approached the work with a sense of disappointment, and a determination to do better as soon as he could.
The Town Hall, a model of Northern civic splendour, was designed by Alfred Waterhouse, who, until Foster eclipsed him, was perhaps the most prolific and commercially successful architect that Britain had ever produced. It sits in Albert Square on a triangular site, its three street façades concealing a courtyard that accommodates a great hall behind a picturesque skyline of serrated gables, topped by an imposing clock tower. A sequence of grand interiors are connected by endless corridors, which Waterhouse pierced with intricate staircases. Inside the great hall, Ford Madox Brown’s series of epic murals tells the story of Manchester, from its origins as a Roman fort, to the arrival of the first Flemish weavers, culminating in the building of the Bridgewater Canal.
After moving to London, Waterhouse built the masterly Natural History Museum in South Kensington, then came several Oxford and Cambridge colleges, and more than fifty private houses, including the Duke of Westminster’s seat at Eaton Hall. He was knighted, and was painted by Alma Tadema, the most fashionable portrait artist of his day. He died in 1905, leaving £250,000 – a fortune worth many millions by today’s standards.
Foster spent two years working at the Town Hall, and didn’t build anything in Manchester before establishing himself in London. But in its scale and material success, his career would one day parallel that of Waterhouse. The two men share a number of traits, being fashionable, renowned businesslike and noted for jealously maintaining a reputation for practical planning and budgeting. Even if Foster had much humbler origins, and lacked a brother who was a founder of the accountancy giant that still carries the Waterhouse name to provide the connections that bring work in the early stages of an architectural career, he has built a firm that has worked throughout the world, on an unprecedented scale.
As soon as you mention Waterhouse’s name, Foster starts sketching the aspect of the Town Hall that has left the most lasting impact on him: the astonishing spectacle of the cascading fountains of the cisterns above the urinals in the men’s lavatories.
I remember that the urinals were beautifully crafted with every cistern enclosed in glass. Each stall was delineated by a great sculpted separating fin in vitreous porcelain, while the wash basins were strung out along the wall in serried ranks. If you stepped up on to one of these banks of urinals, you felt really elevated; they were like great islands.
In 1951 a sixteen-year-old with Foster’s background would have been unlikely to appreciate the wilder shores of Victorian taste that the Town Hall represented. John Betjeman had only just begun to push back the prejudices against the kind of Victorian eclecticism that was then seen at best as a joke, at worst a hideous and impractical embarrassment. It is perhaps not surprising that it should have been the Town Hall’s celebration of the technology of water cisterns that left the deepest impression on Foster. But there was much more for him to look at.
Every day on his way to his desk, Foster would take a different route through the building to find another staircase to explore. The three principal staircases were named for the English, Welsh and Scottish stone of which they were built. Foster was able to pick his way through a riot of polished marble, and chiselled representations of thirteenth-century English gothic. Every aspect of the decorative detail had a narrative to tell. The bees depicted in the tiled ceilings are a version of the symbol of the city. The stone ridges between the vaults are cut to look like ropes spun out of cotton, so as to remind Mancunians what it was that their city’s prosperity had been built on. The front entrance is guarded by a representation of Agricola, the Roman general and governor of Britain, claimed by Manchester as the city’s original founder. In the entrance vestibule, you find the incongruous spectacle of Early English groin vaults, electrically lit by polished brass candelabra dangling above statues of two of the greatest of Manchester’s scientists, John Dalton and his brilliant student James Joule, rendered in white marble. In Joule’s case, Alfred Gilbert’s florid style borders on Art Nouveau.
During his two years at the Town Hall, Foster spent his days doodling at his desk and looking for a way out of the claustrophobic future that his parents had, with the best of intentions, planned for him. While mired in the purgatory of the cashier’s office, he produced one of the most complex of his youthful drawings when he should have been working. Every time a manager went by, Foster tried to hide the drawing, choking at their approach.
But there were also people to talk to about life beyond the Town Hall.
I remember Mr Cobb, who was a clerk in the treasurer’s department. He noticed that I was always sketching, and wandering off to look at buildings in my lunch hour. He told me about his son who was studying to be an architect, and I think it was the first time I began to think about it as something that I might do.
I remember taking a very long walk one lunch hour to see the Daily Express buildings in Ancoats designed by Owen Williams. It was quite a distance, and even though I walked very quickly, there was no time for lunch.
The newspaper has long since abandoned the building but even today, there remains a whiff of the Art Deco glamour of the era of Evelyn Waugh’s Daily Beast about the old Express Building. Designed in 1938, it still conjures up images of sub editors working in green eye-shades, their gartered sleeves rolled up, surrounded by typewriters and stacks of paper. It would have been a place to find copy boys running from desk to desk, and reporters barking into Bakelite telephones.
Owen Williams was essentially an engineer rather than an architect, but he offered his clients both services. He gave the building a sleek, instantly recognisable skin that made a big impression on Foster. The Express Building was unmistakably modern, which is exactly what the Town Hall was not. ‘I knew it was there, and I went looking for it. It was not in a part of town that you could just stumble across it. I remember the chromed strips and the Vitrolite that the black façade was made of. There was no way to get inside.’
Designed twenty years after that visit, the undulating black glass façade of Foster’s design for the Willis Faber Dumas insurance company’s offices in Ipswich pays an inventive tribute to the Express and Foster’s own youthful hunger for ideas and images. Certainly Willis Faber is rooted in a more sophisticated idea of what architecture can be than the Express, which is all surface rather than substance. The Ipswich building is more than the slick skin, which Williams used as a means of establishing the Express as progressive and forward-looking. Williams used the same black glass in Manchester as he did for its headquarters in Fleet Street and its outpost in Glasgow. He was branding them all as parts of the same empire.
Willis Faber is a sequence of spaces. Go through the entrance airlock, and you find yourself in a dazzling atrium with escalators to move you silently up towards the roof garden. On the ground floor, colour saturated with sharp yellow paint and acid green tiles, was a swimming pool. Corporate amenities of this nature may be commonplace now, but they were almost unheard of when Foster found a way to deliver them within the client’s budget, on the verge of the three-day week and the 25 per cent annual inflation rate of the 1970s. Technically they are worlds apart, too. The Express was a chrome-trimmed Austin 7, while Willis Faber is more like a minimal and businesslike BMW. The glass skin in Ipswich has no frame, and hangs from the concrete floor slabs on invisible steel pins. The Express was at heart a glamorous but unsubtle piece of Art Deco packaging devised for the purpose of concealing a print hall and a set of utilitarian offices. Willis Faber works on many more levels. It may be rooted in memories of the tradition represented by the Express Building, but it also embodies an echo of the glass skyscraper split into crystalline fragments that Mies van der Rohe speculated about for a site in Berlin on Friedrichstrasse, in the years immediately after World War One.
Foster was becoming an acute observer of his surroundings, understanding the city around him in terms of urban fabric as much as of individual buildings. ‘I remember walking around one of the Manchester arcades that has since been destroyed. It was the Lancaster Arcade, and built on a curve so that you could not see the ends when you were in the middle of it.’ He also explored the Barton Arcade. These were architectural innovations that he was to put to good use in his own career. He got to know the Kendal Milne department store, the gothic Rylands Library, and the Central Library built in imperial Roman style next to the Town Hall.
Manchester was the embodiment of a great city for Foster, but its character was being eroded brutally as he grew up, and in his student days there was serious damage being done to its fabric. ‘James Stirling told me once that he made a point of not going back to Liverpool, where he was born, when he was asked to give lectures there, because of what the planners had done to the city. I felt much the same about Manchester,’ says Foster.
The city is no longer a place that he recognises. But as a teenager, it opened his eyes to a wider culture far beyond the limits of Crescent Grove. He discovered Manchester’s Art Gallery, where he visited an exhibition of the entries for a competition to design an Oxbridge college. He still recalls Howell, Killick, Partridge & Amis’s project. Ian Murray, his friend from the Town Hall, introduced Foster to the music that Manchester had to offer, and he listened to the Hallé Orchestra conducted by George Weldon performing Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff at the Free Trade Hall. Later, a performance of Sibelius conducted by John Barbirolli in the Free Trade Hall reduced Foster to silence. He remembers listening to the premiere of Vaughan Williams’ Sinfonia Antarctica on the BBC Third Programme in the living room at home, with one hand holding the valve in the back of the radiogram. In Levenshulme’s Regal Cinema he went to see Gone with the Wind, though he preferred Orson Welles in The Third Man. He recalls Piccadilly before the building of the Ramada Hotel and Albert Square, which was then the dignified urban setting for the Town Hall. His time there left him with a set of memories and city experiences that would form the raw material for his consuming interest in urbanism, and the echoes resurface again and again as ideas in Foster’s work.
During the first of his two years at Manchester Town Hall, keen to make his way in the local government hierarchy, Foster took night school classes at Manchester College of Commerce, studying commercial law, commercial general knowledge and accountancy. He hated it. In a desperate attempt to get a university place and escape from the Town Hall, he switched to A-levels in English Literature and Geography. However, trying to compress two years’ worth of grammar school sixth-form studies into three evenings a week for less than a year was an impossible task that defeated him.
With no deferment on educational grounds, when Foster turned eighteen in 1953 he became eligible for national service. Because of his fascination for aeroplanes, he chose to join the Royal Air Force, though he had little expectation of getting the chance to fly. His scepticism was fully justified. After basic training at RAF Hednesford, the air force’s induction camp for national servicemen at Cannock Chase, he was assigned to an engineering unit maintaining a radar installation and was never posted overseas. Most of his military career was spent in a grass-roofed aircraft hangar on the edge of an airbase in the East Midlands. He remembers the sense of futility that came from the knowledge that the Rebecca III radar equipment he and his team were maintaining had been designed for use in an obsolete generation of propeller-engined aircraft. Its slow response time would have been of little use deployed in the new jets.
Aircraftsman Foster 2709757 came home from his national service in 1955, feeling fortunate not to have been shipped straight out to Egypt in time for the abortive invasion of the Suez Canal by Britain, France and Israel. He had enjoyed his time in uniform and emerged from the RAF more assertive and more independent than he had been at the time of his call-up. Though he remained uncertain what exactly it was that he wanted to do, he was adamant that a return to the Town Hall was not an option. The prospect of going back there seemed to him more like the dispiriting threat of a jail sentence than a career. ‘My parents really did not understand why I wanted to give up a safe job at the Town Hall, although they were in every other sense very supportive. I had to discover for myself, in my own way, my ambitions and interests. That took quite a long time.’ In a last-ditch attempt to make him see reason, his father and uncle took him to one of the pubs on the Stockport Road to discuss things over a pint of beer, but he wasn’t having his mind changed, and he told them so.
National Service gave me a break from home, and a taste of independence. There was parental pressure to go back to the Town Hall, but I wasn’t in a mood to do that. It was a job that offered respectability and a pension, which, at the age of twenty-one, I could not get excited about. I came from a background where the only honourable kind of work was manual labour. At the Town Hall, I had moved up into the sort of middle-class world with all the security that my parents never had for themselves, and they yearned for me to have. For all the people around me, and for my parents, that position was an incredible achievement, but I found the Town Hall totally depressing.
For a gifted child growing up in a family that was loving but distant, with no experience of any kind of higher education, working out what he wanted to do did not come easily. He put off making irrevocable decisions about his future by taking on a series of stop-gap jobs while looking for something that would take him out of Levenshulme and the world that his parents knew. During this period Foster wrote to a number of companies that interested him, offering his services. With no qualifications beyond the seven O-level passes out of the nine exams that he had taken at Burnage High School when he was sixteen, he got nowhere.
It took him a long time to find the escape route. At one fruitless interview for a job selling office duplicating machines, he was asked why he had applied. ‘Mainly because it offered the prospect of a company car, and for the £1,000 salary,’ he replied. The gap between Foster’s submerged abilities and his already manifest ambitions disturbed his interviewer enough for him to suggest that what Foster really needed was not a job as a salesman, but professional help in understanding what to do with his life. As a result of that conversation, he began to look for a way out from a year spent drifting aimlessly.
Foster went to see a government-funded unit set up to help ex-servicemen back into civilian life by matching their skills with employers. He filled in the forms, and did the tests. ‘They said, “You have to find something creative,” and they gave me two addresses.’ The first was for a company making rubber flooring that had a vacancy in the design office. It did not long detain him. The other lead was a contact with John Beardshaw, a local architect.
His office was in a row of Georgian houses, next to the university. I went to the interview and was able to make myself sound like a pretty good prospect. I was able to say that I had worked in the city treasurer’s office, in the audit department, and that I had studied commercial law. It was all true, but it was also pretty blown up. But anyway, I got a job as an assistant to the contract manager.
This was not work calculated to make the most of Foster’s creative potential. ‘We were out of the office most of the time, lifting manhole covers on building sites to test if the contractors really had dug manholes underneath them.’
Foster had begun drawing seriously when he was six years old, and he started to think hard about architecture during his school days. But it was never inevitable that he would become an architect. What pushed him towards the subject were the books that he had started to read as a youth: In the Nature of Materials, Henry-Russell Hitchcock’s sprawling 400-page eulogy to Frank Lloyd Wright; Vers une architecture, Le Corbusier’s description of architecture as the masterly play of light – and the accompanying and apparently surreal pictures of aircraft and cars and grain silos juxtaposed with the Parthenon.
But even when he came home from national service, Foster still had no real understanding of what it meant to be an architect, or of how to become one. ‘I was hypnotised by design,’ Foster remembers. In particular he was enthralled by the design-conscious furniture of the period, a rosewood and teak universe bounded by the Gomme company’s G-Plan range at one end and, at the other, by Hille’s production of the modern movement’s classics that seemed to promise drip-dry Dacron-lined modernity with every afrormosia table top and leg. It was a vision of a world that was everything his own home was not. And he wanted to be part of it, and so, manifestly, to leave the Crescent Grove of his childhood, and less explicitly perhaps, to leave behind his parents and their view of the world and their values.
Foster, at his attic desk in his tweed sports jacket and his grey flannels, was still in awe of the old-seeming men in smocks in the drawing office in the front room on the first floor of the house. He assumed that these people were consumed with the same passion he had developed in the reading room of the Levenshulme Library for the wild-eyed architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier. And thrillingly, they were actually building, not just dreaming of architecture. To Foster their exotic work clothes were a badge of belonging to a Masonic sect that he could never join as much as a practical way of keeping their clothes clean at a time when ink and rubber were flying across the drawing boards. ‘I lived in wonder of the guys who wore the white smocks,’ he said. But in London, the smock was passing into oblivion. By then it was an already slightly archaic means of establishing a hierarchy between the assistants who did the working drawings in an architect’s office and the partners in suits who led the design work and were trusted to talk to the clients.
The Beardshaw office was an unlikely place for Foster to make up his mind to become an architect. There was nothing memorable about the office’s designs, which can best be described as workmanlike and commercial. The only project for which Beardshaw was responsible that got even a cursory mention in the contemporary architectural press was Television House, built for Associated TV in Manchester at a time when it was struggling to compete with Granada. And there is little to mark it out from its contemporaries: a simple slab with a banal curtain wall, set in a masonry-skinned steel frame. Occasionally, Beardshaw would try something a little more daring, like the time that he hired a Polish assistant to work with him on designing a petrol filling station with a free plan. Architecture as practised by Beardshaw was a traditional sort of profession. It was like being a country doctor, or running a small solicitor’s office. Foster might have learned how to work with reinforced concrete, and plate glass, but the practice was run on lines that had otherwise changed very little since the early nineteenth century. Beardshaw took on apprentices, who paid to go through a training process with him. But working there was the best chance that Foster was offered to get close to the practice of architecture, and he took it eagerly.
It was not long before Foster discovered for himself the distance between the narrow pragmatism of provincial architecture in the Manchester of the 1950s and the pursuit of architecture as personified by Howard Roark, hero of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, with his burning passion for building at any cost in truly Nietzschean fashion. One morning he happened to be talking to an assistant in the drawing office who was a part-time student at the college of art. ‘I asked him what he thought about Frank Lloyd Wright. He looked at me, puzzled, and asked: “Is he at the art school too?”’
Shocked, but also reassured that he was not in fact dealing with demigods, Foster started to engage with the other architectural assistants, usually at lunch over sandwiches. ‘How do you become an architect?’ he finally asked the least intimidating of them.
‘You find a school of architecture, you apply and, if you are accepted, you go,’ was the reply.
‘It’s that simple then?’
‘You have to do a portfolio first.’
‘What is a portfolio?’
‘It has to have some drawings, and some paintings to show what you can do.’
‘Let me see one,’ asked Foster.
It was all patiently explained to him: ‘This is a shop drawing, and this is a perspective, the client sees this one.’
Which is how, one Saturday morning in the spring of 1955, Norman Foster came to be painting the view from his bedroom at Crescent Grove, looking over the rooftops and the chimneys. It was the finishing touch to a portfolio that was stocked mainly with copies of other people’s work from the drawing office at Beardshaw’s. Every evening he was careful to be the last out of the building, so that he could borrow drawings without being disturbed. He took them home, copied them in his bedroom on the table by the window, and was the first back into the office in the morning to return them to the wooden plan chest before they were missed.
When Foster had completed his portfolio, he showed it to Beardshaw, who was impressed enough by this unexpected metamorphosis from contract administrator to would-be architect, in his most junior employee, to transfer him to the drawing office.
When I had assembled enough of a wodge of drawings, I thought I should tell Mr Beardshaw. I knocked on his door.
‘I have decided I want to study to be an architect and I thought I should let you know. I’ve got a portfolio.’
‘How did you manage that?’
‘I borrowed the drawings, I have done some paintings.’
‘Show me,’ he said. ‘Its amazing, you are a square peg in a round hole.’
Foster was issued with a tee square, a spiral-bound copy of Burnet, Tate & Lorne’s book of graphic standards and set to work in the drawing office.
‘I drew on linen and worked with ruling pens. They were very hard to use, and the effect of discharging a blob of ink over a drawing would be disastrous. You had to prepare surfaces with talcum powder before starting.’
Beardshaw tried to encourage Foster to stay in his office, suggesting that he could easily study part-time, and continue working to pay his way through the years that it would take to qualify as an architect. He began to push more challenging projects Foster’s way to persuade him that it was worth staying.
‘He gave me what he called a problem job. There was a client who wanted a new house, but his wife wanted to keep her old curtains, which meant that the windows had been defined before I could start.’ But even with this kind of sweetener, it was already too late to persuade Foster to stay.
Beardshaw was later to prove very helpful to Foster when he set up his first practice, Team Four, with Richard Rogers. When Team Four got into trouble with the Architects Registration Council for practising without having any fully qualified partners, Beardshaw gave them a professional umbrella and allowed Foster and Rogers time to get themselves registered.
They have been merged into a single school now, but in the 1950s there were two places to study architecture in Manchester. One was the university, and the other was the municipal art school. Displaying the shrewd chess-playing skill – that ability to see beyond the immediate and take a long-term view – that has characterised his approach to making decisions at every stage in his career, Foster talked to people in the Beardshaw office about which school was better and was advised that the university school definitely offered the best prospects.
Foster was interviewed by Professor Reginald Annandale Cordingley, Manchester University School of Architecture’s gentlemanly head. He had been running the school since 1933, and was best known as a serious architectural scholar. He was responsible for a well-regarded monograph on the Mausoleum of Augustus in Rome, as well as for editing a massive edition of the Banister Fletcher History of Architecture on the Comparative Method, to which Foster was later asked to contribute. On being shown Foster’s painting of the view from the window at Crescent Grove, Cordingley suggested that it would make a fine Christmas card.
Foster was offered a place on the architecture course to start in the autumn term of 1956. In order for this to happen, some flexibility with the interpretation of the academic regulations was required on Cordingley’s part. He waived the two A-level passes that were normally a condition of entry, and assigned Foster to a dormant architecture diploma course that ultimately offered the same qualification as the mainstream degree in architecture.
But there was one obstacle Cordingley could not finesse. In the 1950s most British art schools were still funded directly by the local authority in whose area they were based. Manchester’s education department told Foster that he would get a grant only if he agreed to study at the municipal art school.
When Foster got the letter from the council spelling out its refusal to support him at university, he was furious. If he was going to spend five years somewhere, he wanted it to be the best possible place. He insisted on getting a personal interview with the official in the education department who was responsible for the decision. It was a heated conversation, one that left Foster more determined to go to the university than ever.
‘Why can’t I get a grant?’ Foster asked.
‘He said to me, “We fund the art school, and you can qualify as an architect there.”
‘“But it’s not as good,” I said, and told him what he could do with his grant.’
If Foster couldn’t get a grant, he would work his way through his studies to support himself.
In the days of universal grants for students of modest means, and for all mature students, he felt hard done by, as well as humiliated that he was going to have to live with his parents for the next five years. Staying on at Crescent Grove, with its voraciously hungry gas meter, was not the way to live the bohemian student life that he had begun to dream of. ‘At the time I went to university I really was angry. I am sure that I had a chip on my shoulder. I was the only guy not getting a grant. I was the only student living at home.’
Foster was excited, and not a little anxious, about starting his university career but, back at home after his first day, he was crushed and disappointed by his parents’ lack of curiosity about all that he had been doing.
‘I don’t remember my mother asking me about how things had gone. I think that she assumed it would end badly, so she didn’t want to ask too many questions, but she never said anything, which upset me a little.’
Over the years, Foster has tried to smooth away the hurt. ‘I have come to realise that it wasn’t that she was indifferent to what I had managed to do. She was always anxious, and expecting that things were not going to turn out well, and so did not want to raise her hopes.’
As soon as he started at university, Foster’s ambition took over, pushed by a determination to prove himself. ‘I was so highly motivated that, when I got into architecture school, nobody was going to stop me. The opportunity to study architecture was the most incredible privilege. I would have paid to do it, which is effectively what I was doing.’
In fact, once Foster got to Manchester he found the staff sympathetic about his financial problems. Thomas Howarth, author of an early study of Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s work, did all that he could to get Foster a grant. Eventually, just before Howarth left Manchester for Canada, he found a way to get Foster a bursary after his third year.
In Foster’s day, Manchester University’s school of architecture had a reputation for teaching traditional drafting and technical design, but it was not noted for its ideological conviction or for the rigour of the intellectual content of its courses. Students still followed the approach that Professor Cordingley had first laid down twenty-four years earlier when he had got the job of running the school. He expected students to acquire the skills needed to do watercolour washes, and to make a measured drawing; a process that sent Foster to a variety of buildings with a tape measure and a sketchbook. The idea was to size up a building, and thus be able to analyse its essential physical and spatial characteristics – a distant echo of Piranesi’s surveys of the ruins of Rome. It was down to the individual student to select the buildings that they would explore and draw, but there was a tacit understanding that they should be focusing on Georgian buildings, since their classical proportions and details were thought to offer the most telling lessons.
Foster, however, showed an independent streak. While the other students in his year were sketching Georgian houses, most of his time was spent clambering over much humbler, industrial buildings. He surveyed a Victorian gin palace, as well as making measured drawings of several barns, and then of a windmill. In the summer of 1959, he cycled into North Wales, measuring and drawing a handsome stone barn at Cochwillan, Llanllechid.
Foster has kept those survey drawings, just as he has kept every single notebook and student brief that he has ever possessed. The set of drawings featuring the barn at Cochwillan are impressive, going far beyond atmospheric sketches, or a representation of a flat elevation in their scope. There are notes all over the sheet of paper that record Foster’s thoughts as he clambered over the building, registering details about the condition of the barn and its construction. His notes are in a style that looks very different from the characteristic handwriting that he has developed over the years, and which his whole office now tries to reproduce. But it wasn’t the handwriting of an immature schoolboy either. Foster in the late 1950s was faithfully reproducing the architectural handwriting of a previous generation. With an elaborate flourish for the looped tail of the ‘y’, and semi-gothic forms for the letters ‘a’ and ‘e’, it is the carefully artistic but clear hand of a bow-tied professional from the 1940s.
That same summer, Foster spent three days at Rufford Hall in Cheshire. He explored the medieval house and drew the elevations with spirit, but what really intrigued him was the oak-pegged timber roof structure inside the stone walls. He devoted no less than thirty sketches to exploring exactly what it was that all those timber joints were doing and how the beams fitted together. It’s the sense of clarity of Foster’s fluid drawings that impresses most. He drew an eighteenth-century barn, built from clunch – the local chalk stone at Burwell Priory – and patiently analysed how every beam was put together, and how they supported the thatched roof.
Later, Foster’s elegant study of a windmill at Bourne in Cambridgeshire would win him the silver award in a national student competition. His prize was £100: a substantial sum in 1959. On this occasion, Foster knew that he was drawing to impress and not just to record information. He drew front, back and side views of the mill, but carefully composed them to form a single drawing. He used an Egyptian Bold Extended letter face, drawing it freehand for the title, and peopled the drawing with figures to provide a sense of scale. But they also have the effect of making you wonder how exactly Foster managed to measure all the complex elements that made up the top of the windmill’s sails, 60 feet above the ground.
By looking at buildings like these, Foster was demonstrating that even as a student he had a mind of his own when it came to understanding architecture. ‘It wasn’t that I rejected the Georgian tradition – I enjoyed it; but the obsession with drawing up decorative details year after year, almost by rote, seemed questionable at best.’
Foster’s latent interest in vernacular buildings was triggered by the Architectural Review, the professional magazine that during this period was documenting the impressive utilitarian English tradition of mills and barns and docks, which its editors saw as an antecedent for the modern movement. It devoted entire issues to the kind of industrial buildings and cotton mills that Foster saw around him in Manchester at the time.
In the design projects that Foster worked on there are also traces of the themes that were going to become important preoccupations for him in his professional career.
My very first design project was a boathouse and retreat in the Lake District. The expectation was that you would design a shed for the boat and put a little cottage alongside it to stay in at the weekend. But my design was different. I integrated the boathouse and the retreat to form a single building on the waterfront. The boat went directly inside the building and the living accommodation was located alongside it, behind a glass screen facing out on to the river. I was the only student who integrated the project in that way.
This idea of combining functionally disparate elements and building types into a single envelope was to shape many of his early projects once he had set up in practice. It reflected an unwillingness to accept the limits of conventional building types, and the belief that he could find a way to achieve more with limited resources by going back to the fundamentals of a design problem, rather than accepting preconceptions.
In his architectural history classes, Foster was sketching the Pantheon from photographs, and producing imaginative three-dimensional representations of the forum in Rome that reflected Professor Cordingley’s expertise.
The course progressed by setting design projects of increasing complexity until, at the end of the third year, students were put to the test by being asked to synthesise everything that they had learned so far. To move into the final two-year phase of the course, they had to get through an intensive three-day charette that involved the design of a complex building, and the resolution of its technical and construction details. In Foster’s year, the brief was for the design of a theatre, and it involved not just a formal plan, but also all the acoustic drawings necessary to demonstrate that their design was a realistic proposition. Foster passed without difficulty. Alongside this, Foster was set projects that tested his drafting and his imaginative skills. He was asked to portray the end of the world, and to evoke the period detail of a Roman amphitheatre. He carefully kept the cyclostyled handout notes that provided him with a brief history of the English House. His own notes and sketches record the history of architecture on the Banister Fletcher model from the Parthenon to the Pantheon. He designed a Skiffle Dive, but the surviving photographs from his time at Manchester show Foster wearing a bow tie and tweed rather than teddy-boy draped jacket.
In his last two years at Manchester, Foster embarked on a parallel town planning course, alongside his architectural studies. With the encouragement of Professor Thornley, Foster began to think about the idea of building architecture at the scale of infrastructure. From the earliest days in his career, he had been as interested in how a city might be designed as he was in the individual building.
Foster became fascinated by the work of Gordon Cullen and Kenneth Browne, who were using the pages of the Architectural Review at that time to put forward their ideas about Townscape, a picturesque contemporary Anglo Saxon offshoot of Camillo Sitte’s ideas about city planning. They explored the way that we experience our urban surroundings as a sequence of self-contained but interrelated spaces as we move in and around them. They looked at how one part of a city after another is gradually revealed as we move through them. They analysed how the elements of an urban composition are built up. And they recorded their observations through a series of drawings that attempted to interpret the elements of the urban landscape and their interaction with each other. Foster’s graphic technique, in particular his trick of annotating his sketches with stylised hearts and eyes, owes a conscious debt to Cullen and Browne, who were using these devices in the Architectural Review in the 1950s.
In his final year Foster worked on a new museum for the Faculty of Anthropology at Cambridge. A three-storey glass-walled gallery would have housed the collection’s largest pieces. Foster and Partners built the Law Faculty for the university forty years later.
His accomplished drafting skills helped Foster work his way through the course. He remembers, one weekend in 1958, being brought in to work in the office of George Grenfell-Baines on an unsuccessful entry for the competition to design Toronto’s new City Hall. Grenfell-Baines, who went on to establish the Building Design Partnership that grew to be one of Britain’s largest architectural practices, had a career that has striking parallels with Foster’s. Born in Lancashire, the son of a railwayman, Grenfell-Baines left school at fourteen, then worked in the city surveyor’s office, before finally getting a place at Manchester University’s architecture school.
Foster moonlighted for the big Manchester architectural offices when they needed a deft perspective artist to seduce a client, or to win over a planning committee. He fitted in jobs as a labourer, and even for a while as a bouncer, while studying.
He was also beginning to travel. Every vacation, after intensive bouts of well-paid manual work and the occasional financial bonus of a scholarship or travel prize, he would go somewhere new, touring Europe to look at buildings. He started to haunt the classic urban landscapes from Shepherd Market to Greenwich in London and abroad from Helsinki to Florence, coming back with notebooks full of annotated sketches. He paced out the Piazza del Campo in Siena, helped by the fact that his feet measured exactly twelve inches in length. He toured Palladio’s houses in the Veneto and saw BBPR’s Torre Velasca in Milan. He went to see what little Utzon had built in Denmark before he entered the Sydney Opera House competition. He saw the early work of Arne Jacobsen, as well as buildings designed by lesser-known architects such as Kay Fisker. He sketched the interior of Ronchamp, although without much sympathy. These were conventional architectural tastes at a time when more adventurous schools were already beginning to point their students towards early Viennese proto-modernists, or Italian rationalists.
Foster was rapidly outgrowing Manchester. He spent the summer of 1960 in Hugh Casson’s office in London. Casson presided over a practice that was well regarded at the time. The Casson Conder Partnership was designing Cambridge University’s new arts faculty buildings on Sidgwick Avenue, in the form of a series of updated cloisters, built from brick, and hoisted up on columns to leave the ground open. Foster worked on the project, and the experience suggested the brief for his final student scheme when he got back to Manchester.
Foster told Casson’s biographer, Jose Manser: ‘I looked at what they were doing, and thought that this would be an office where I could learn something. I was right, it was an extremely civilised and enjoyable experience. Unlike many of the offices that I’d had experience of in Manchester, they had a real passion for architecture, wanting to talk of it, and live it all the time.’
It is hard to imagine two personalities more different than Casson and Foster. Boarding school and Cambridge-educated, the product of nannies and a home of comfortable upper-middle-class ease, the quintessential gentleman amateur, Casson’s languid patrician air was in the sharpest contrast to the driven, dedicated, and endlessly professional Foster. They barely spoke in the office, though Foster acknowledges a debt to Casson’s facility with the pencil. ‘I think I still do characters that bear a close resemblance to his when I’m putting people in a drawing.’ A quarter-century later the two architects were at the Prince of Wales’ table for dinner at Hampton Court on the night that Charles launched his first and most violent attack on the architectural profession. Even though Casson, in his role as a judge in the National Gallery competition, was in some measure responsible for provoking the attack, he claimed to be sympathetic with the Prince’s views. Foster was ready for a blunter response.
The university may have boasted the best school of architecture in Manchester, but it was not, as Foster knew by the time that he had finished there, the best school in Britain. The Architectural Association in London was a lot bigger, and much more adventurous. Mainstream modernism had already come to be seen as old hat there, and its students were sceptical about the sentimentality of the kind of Scandinavian-inspired sweetness and light of the Festival of Britain, for which Hugh Casson had been responsible. Manchester was only just getting around to discovering it.
Manchester was very good for me; it was good because it was demanding on draughtsmanship, and technique, and understanding buildings. But Manchester was not what I would call a good school of architecture in the sense that I would judge one now. There was never any discussion about architecture. You were given the grade and that was that. There was no debate about the work.
Manchester University was very traditional. It was nothing like, say, the Architectural Association, or what was then the Regent Street Polytechnic. I remember visiting the studios there and finding an unbelievably creative environment. Manchester, on the other hand, was very conventional, and very disciplined. It was frustrating because you never had the opportunity to debate. You would know what was expected, you would produce the work, it would be assessed, and maybe a week or two weeks later you would get it back with a mark. You would never have a chance to present your work. There was no dialogue. We were still studying the Classical orders and drawing them in ink on linen. It was very tough in a traditional academic sense, but stylistically it was very limiting.
This was a faithful reflection of a period when, as the architectural historian, Foster’s friend Reyner Banham, whose criticism he started reading in 1959, put it, architecture in Britain was still ‘the staid Queen Mother of the arts’. There was something quite different going on in architecture which entirely passed Manchester by.
In London, Peter Cook and David Greene at the Architectural Association were about to start work on Archigram, the student magazine that was to become famous by attempting to drag architecture into a world in which Yuri Gagarin had just become the first man in space, the first weather satellite had been launched from Cape Canaveral, photocopiers, holograms and the contraceptive pill had just been invented.
Archigram declared that:
A new generation of architecture must arise with forms and spaces which seem to reject the precepts of the modern, yet in fact retains those precepts. We have chosen to bypass the decrepit Bauhaus image which is an insult to functionalism. You can roll out steel any length, you can blow up a balloon any size. You can mould plastics any shape. The blokes that built the Forth Bridge, they didn’t worry.
In comparison with the Archigram group at the Architectural Association, whose student projects included designs for living pods and gasket-jointed houses, Foster’s boathouse and even his university museum seemed pretty tame. Subconsciously, Foster knew it too, but he didn’t know where to look for something more challenging.
As his studies were coming to an end, Foster realised that he needed more from his education. He wanted to carry on his studies in America, in pursuit of all the things that Manchester hadn’t been able to give him and which he was just becoming aware of. In the monochrome climate of post-war Britain, and before the disasters of Vietnam, the political assassinations and the burning ghettoes, America still seemed like the source of plenty, and of freedom. Foster had done well enough to stand a good chance of getting accepted to take a master’s degree anywhere in America. What he needed, as well as a place to study, was the financial help to pay his way.
Foster looked at his options. He could apply for a Fulbright scholarship, as Richard Rogers did; that would get him to America. In fact, the two first met at a reception in London for Fulbright students heading for Yale. But the Fulbright had at least one drawback for a student who was continually thinking about the next step but three. In principle, students on Fulbright scholarships could not legally stay on after graduating to work in America, although it was a handicap that didn’t get in Richard Rogers’ way when he got a job in San Francisco after leaving Yale. There was an alternative, the Henry Fellowship, tenable at either Harvard or Yale, which would allow him to hold a green card, and to work in America.
Foster successfully applied for both scholarships. ‘I turned down the Fulbright because I wanted the flexibility to work. I could not imagine going and just studying.’ He had seen the Henry Fellowship advertised on a university noticeboard, applied, and was asked to go to London for the interview. ‘I found myself walking in to be faced by a room full of people asking questions at a table that seemed to stretch into infinity, like a New Yorker cartoon.’
The Henry was aimed at encouraging a link between Oxbridge students and the Ivy League. Foster was unusual in applying, and subsequently securing the grant, from Manchester. ‘I don’t think anybody from a provincial university had ever got one before. I really bust through the Oxbridge thing.’
Foster spent the summer after finishing his degree working for John Beardshaw at his office in London. Then he set off for America, leaving home without much reflection on how his parents would view his departure.
‘Perhaps I was insensitive, they had provided everything they could for me. The least important thing of all, funding my education, was the only thing they couldn’t provide.’