America, from the viewpoint of the young Norman Foster sitting in the cheap seats at Levenshulme’s Palace Cinema, looked like the only place to be. It was not just the distant promise of James Dean, or the music of the Inkspots and the Andrews Sisters, which in those days appealed to him much more than Elvis or John Coltrane, or even the cars with the high-rise tail fins. More important for an ambitious architect, it was obvious in 1960 that America had taken on the leadership role in design that Europe had once had. The continuing prestige enjoyed by the Bauhaus exiles who abandoned Germany for America in the 1930s made that inevitable. They had invented modernism, and everywhere that they went, they took the definitive version with them.
The alternatives were not promising. Le Corbusier was certainly enormously influential. But he had stayed in France during World War Two and conducted an ill-advised flirtation with Mussolini and the Vichy government. By the time he lost the leadership of the design team working on the United Nations building in New York, he was looking very much like the face of Old Europe. For younger architects such as James Stirling, Le Corbusier’s sculptural manner of the 1950s looked like a betrayal of his radical past. Italy and its rationalist architects had been discredited by their association with fascism, even if their work interested more adventurous members of the younger generation. And Britain had all but ignored the modern movement.
Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer, pausing only briefly in London on their way westward across the Atlantic, had, with the mellifluous assistance of the young Philip Johnson, captured America’s intellectual heartland. Having taken over the direction of Harvard’s architecture school, Gropius had appointed Breuer to the faculty. After the war, they moved from the avant garde to the corporate world, and began building on an expansive scale fuelled by America’s apparently unstoppable economic boom. Another European subject of Johnson’s attention, Mies van der Rohe, had moved to Chicago from Berlin just before the outbreak of the Second World War, and taken on the directorship of the Illinois Institute of Technology’s architecture school. He built the IIT campus, and finally realised his first skyscraper, the Seagram Tower, in New York. Its bronze mullions and glass curtain wall composed with infinite care set the pattern for every sophisticated office building around the world for the next thirty years.
All this imported talent – the ‘Silver Princes’ as Tom Wolfe acidly called them in his book From Bauhaus to Our House, the superior architectural beings from the far side of the universe, greeted by what he sharply characterised as rows of awestruck natives prostrating themselves as soon their saviours had crash-landed – certainly had an immediate impact on an influential generation of American architects. I.M. Pei and Paul Rudolph were taught directly by the refugees. Louis Kahn, Eero Saarinen and Rudolph tried to build a specifically American form of modernism in architecture and they in turn were attracting their own followers.
Foster was well aware of the striking direction that their work had taken. He was especially interested in Louis Kahn, who managed to be both monumental and fascinated by the thinking of Buckminster Fuller.
For any young architect who wanted to get close to the centre of energy for their subject, America was an essential destination in a way that England was not. What attracted Foster to Yale rather than to Harvard or Princeton were the people that he hoped would be teaching him. In spite of a moment of doubt when he discovered that Kahn had just left New Haven for Philadelphia, Foster had decided that only Yale would do. Just as in Manchester it had to be the university and not the art school, in America, it had to be Yale because it was the best.
And there were many who agreed with him. Yale in the 1960s was developing a reputation for attracting bright, ambitious students. Sometimes they were too ambitious. With a raised eyebrow, Thomas Beeby the Chicago architect, who went through Yale a year behind Foster, sardonically suggested of his student days, that:
It was the era of the great hero and everyone wanted to be a master architect. They had master classes and you could study with Lou Kahn at Penn or you could go study with Paul Rudolph at Yale or you could go and study with Sert at Harvard. Yale was the most energized place. It attracted an amazing group of people who came to study with Paul Rudolph. They were an extremely diverse group. Charlie Gwathmey was there, David Childs [the man who went on to dominate America’s leading corporate architectural practice, SOM, and to wrest control of the Ground Zero site from Daniel Libeskind] was there. It was pretty heavy stuff. It was all about becoming a genius, you knew where you were going to hone your skills and become one of the great architects of your period.
But architecture was not the only thing on Foster’s mind. America looked like the kind of classless yet glamorous society in which he could not just thrive professionally, but also enjoy himself. He still had wartime memories of the stylishly dressed and seemingly affluent GIs at the dance hall off Stockport Road, under the shelter of the barrage balloons tethered on Crowcroft Park. The America of Foster’s imagination was a place that would allow him to escape from the lingering sense of anger and frustration that he still felt about life in Britain.
At home, he saw himself as an awkward, provincial outsider, held back by his accent, his lack of social ease, and a background that would do little for his chances of succeeding as an architect. In America he could wipe out all that uncomfortable personal history and start again. Success in America would come on the basis of nothing other than his own talent. The street that he grew up in, the school that he had gone to, and his lack of family connections would not hold him back. By moving to America, he was reinventing himself and starting again.
Armed with his fellowship and his place on the master’s programme at Yale, he was being allowed to join the ranks of the privileged. And with a green card, he had the means to stay permanently. Foster came very close to doing just that. If he hadn’t met Richard Rogers and the chance to start a practice with him in London had not come up, Foster would very likely have made his life in America.
Foster set out to make as much as he could from his admission to what he clearly saw as his own personal new world. Most scholarship students making their way to America from Britain in the early 1960s were content to spend three long days at sea playing deck quoits on the crossing from Southampton to New York. Richard Rogers took the Queen Elizabeth and was met by a reporter from the Yale daily newspaper who wanted his first thoughts about coming to America, in the manner of so many architects from Le Corbusier down. They published his picture in the paper too.
To Foster the sea crossing seemed like a hopelessly old-fashioned waste of time. Why would he want to sail all the way to New York when he could fly? Starting in the way that he meant to go on, he took the plane. He justified the price of the ticket in what was to become a very Foster-like way. In Foster’s mind, the flight could not be regarded as an extravagance if it was understood as the most efficient answer to a problem, a high-tech solution that would allow him to make a better job of things. It’s the way that he explained himself to his cautious and financially careful mother. Just as twenty years later he would, taking his lead from Buckminster Fuller, compare the high-tech solution of launching a communications satellite to the apparently cheaper but actually much more profligate strategy of laying 2,000 miles of undersea transatlantic cable. Of course, the fact that Foster loved to fly also played its part in the equation.
Foster spent the summer of 1961 working in London for John Beardshaw, living above the office next to the Economist building in St James’s. He stayed on until the last possible minute to earn as much money as he could, planning to arrive in America in September just as the Yale term started. The cheapest fare that he could find involved stopping off in Iceland on the way, but at £100 for a one-way ticket, it still cost almost as much as he earned in a month. And for once technology let him down. The silver-skinned Icelandair DC 6 Super Cloudmaster, powered by four piston-driven propeller engines had a technical problem at 20,000 feet over Scotland. While the mechanics waited for the spare parts they needed to fix it, Foster was frustratingly stuck for two days in a hotel outside Prestwick Airport in a town with no pubs. Even so, he managed to arrive in time for the start of term. The immaculate and stylishly dressed Eldred Evans, third of the three British students on the course, got into trouble for turning up five days late.
Foster landed in New York, at what was still called Idlewild Airport: John F. Kennedy had little more than two years left to live. Eero Saarinen, however, had died just a few days previously; his masterpiece at the airport, the TWA terminal with its complex soaring concrete shells representing a bird in flight, was almost complete.
When he finally got to New Haven, Foster stepped off the Greyhound bus and found himself being welcomed into the Ivy League by the master of Jonathan Edwards College in which, as a Henry fellow, he had been allocated a handsome set of rooms. It was a Sunday evening, and the master and his wife were hosting a cocktail party in their garden overlooking the college’s quadrangle. The master’s wife, it seemed, was related to the mayor of Liverpool. Foster was dismayed to be asked if he happened to know him.
Yale is an enclave of privilege, filled with the scent of that very particular variety of well-heeled American philanthropy. It sits at the centre of what is now the battered little city of New Haven, where very few home-grown twenty-year-olds share the opportunities that are open to a typical Yale undergraduate of the same age.
New Haven was originally laid out on a grid plan of nine square blocks in 1640, an ancient beginning by American standards. George Washington mustered the local militia on the green during the War of Independence. Led by Benedict Arnold, before he went over to the redcoats, they marched on the British, three days’ away in Massachusetts.
New Haven is where Sam Colt made the first of the revolvers that bear his name in Eli Whitney’s factory. The university was founded in 1701. But Yale adopted the Oxbridge model of residential colleges for its students only comparatively recently in its history. It picked English gothic as the most appropriate architectural language to use for building them at a moment when the gothic revival had already come and long gone.
Look at Yale’s most conspicuous architectural landmark, the Harkness Tower – completed in 1921, and modelled on the tower of the fifteenth-century parish church of St Botolph in Lincolnshire – through half-closed eyes and you could for a moment feel that you were back in a dreamlike version of the later Middle Ages. But the regularity of the blocks on which the university is planned somehow denies the essence of the scholarly gothic on which the architecture is based. Jonathan Edwards College opened for students in 1932, by which time its stone-faced buildings seemed completely out of their time, more like a curious blend of archaeology and stage set than a reflection of a living cultural tradition. The master’s lodge sits on the corner of High Street, above the main entrance. There is another gate named Wheelock, a dining room, a common room, and an elaborate collection of chimneys and oriel windows supplied apparently by the metre.
Admission to Yale brings, along with much else, access to the leisured ease of the Jacobean-themed reading room of the university’s Sterling Library. Completed in 1930, its battered green leather sofas look like something from the House of Commons and combine with its Latin inscriptions over the fireplace and its inglenooks facing the cloistered garden outside to suggest a place desperate to look older than its years. Even Yale’s gymnasium is built in exuberant gothic style, and it comes equipped with a tower not much less imposing than that of Durham Cathedral. It is, in short, a university that might have been imagined by Ralph Lauren.
But beyond its gothic zone, New Haven in Foster’s day was suffering from the early symptoms of the urban decay that Jane Jacobs identified in her book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities: a rotting centre and spreading affluent suburbs.
Away from the security of the city lights and the campus police it would become a troubled place to live after the race riot of 1967. There were whole streets in New Haven in which the only functioning buildings were adult cinemas. Everything else for blocks at a stretch had been shuttered and abandoned, burnt out or flattened. The blight and the squalor outside the university precinct was made all the more poignant by the fragments of Early Americana in the form of colonial church steeples, marooned in the midst of it. In the 1970s, New Haven’s Union Station, designed by Cass Gilbert with imperial swagger, was boarded up, and passengers caught the train to New York from a prefabricated hut tethered beside it along the tracks. The impact of empty factories, white flight and dereliction was not helped by brutal planning policies that rammed freeways through residential neighbourhoods. In Foster’s time in New Haven, these disastrous strategies were directed with what were no doubt the best intentions by an ambitious mayor, Richard Lee, who saw himself as the Robert Moses of the Kennedy era, and was determined to make New Haven into an international model for urban renewal. He was remarkably successful at lobbying Washington to divert federal funds to New Haven ahead of other cities. The money allowed him to turn the place into a laboratory for wholesale urban redevelopment.
Lee justified calling in the bulldozers to demolish large swathes of his city by talking melodramatically about what he called the ‘shame’ brought upon New Haven by the 10,000 disease-carrying rats that he claimed his rat catchers had exterminated while cleaning up a single city block. His was a form of urban renewal that reflected what was soon to become American strategy in Vietnam. He was ready to destroy the city in order to save it. But before the real impact of what he was doing became apparent, he got himself on the cover of Saturday Evening Post looking young and statesmanlike. And he shipped in all the famous architects that he could find in vain attempts to help fix his ruined city. Lee eventually became the longest-serving American mayor of his time. To help keep himself in office, he persuaded both President Kennedy and Rocky Marciano to campaign for him.
Yale’s president at the time, Alfred Griswold, was moving in very much the same direction as Lee, and investing in all the most conspicuous twentieth-century architecture that he could squeeze on to the campus.
Foster’s graduate class had its studio in the most impressive example of this new policy of architectural patronage. Foster’s drawing board was situated on the top floor of Louis Kahn’s first significant building, his extension to the Yale Art Museum. Kahn’s wing is a suave and lucid design, deftly inserted into the gothic edge of the campus in 1952. His design defers to the Ruskinian taste for Venetian gothic of the rest of the arts buildings, but exhibits a firm sense of conviction of its own. On the outside, Kahn’s caramel-coloured brickwork is disciplined by three stone bands, with most of the glazing confined to the sophisticated proportions of the north wall overlooking what in Foster’s day was the construction site of the new Art and Architecture Building. Inside the door, just by the gallery’s bank of lifts, are the van Gogh sunflowers that Foster remembers passing every day on the way up to his studio. The ceiling is a tetrahedron grid of polished cast concrete. The floors are black slate, a combination that comes close to the palette of materials that Foster and Rogers would use for the house they built together in Cornwall.
As he wandered around New Haven, sampled his first deli sandwich and discovered the cavernous pizzeria in Little Italy, tended by an elderly man in a white apron and surgical shoes who shuffled back and forth between table and oven, Foster found himself coming face to face with some of the most inventive new architecture in the world. There was little to match it in Britain at the time, least of all in Manchester, where most new building work in the 1950s and 1960s took the form of provincial paraphrases of metropolitan originals. Yale wasn’t like that, it had the real thing. It was a place that was working with those architects who, through sheer self-belief, were establishing themselves as the creative leaders of their profession, devising a new version of contemporary architecture, one that had moved on from the machine age aesthetic of the early modernists.
Louis Kahn has become the most highly regarded of the generation of architects that worked in Yale. But Eero Saarinen, who designed the Morse and Ezra Stiles colleges, also had a major impact, even if Reyner Banham was particularly rude about his attempts to be simultaneously picturesque and modern. Until his untimely death at fifty, Saarinen was one of America’s most promising architects. In his brief career he explored a range of very different forms of architectural expression. At Yale, he built not just student halls of residence, but also a stadium with a roof like a whale for the university hockey team.
Other architects active in New Haven in the early 1960s included Philip Johnson, who was responsible for a group of research laboratories, and Gordon Bunshaft. At the time that Foster arrived, Bunshaft was about to start building the Beinecke Rare Books Library. The prominent Yale architectural historian Vincent Scully was even ruder about it than Banham had been in his onslaught on Saarinen.
Living in his parents’ house in Manchester, and working to support himself, Foster had been a social oddity. Working your way through college in America was entirely normal and Foster felt comfortable there immediately, though as a graduate student he found that work left little time for socialising with the undergraduates living all around him. But as Scully would have told him had he asked, Yale was far from the classless society Foster imagined. As an Irish Catholic art history student at Yale in the 1930s, Scully had worked just as Foster had done in Manchester. Waiting at table on his more affluent, white Anglo-Saxon Protestant fellow students, had left him in no doubt as to the nature of the social hierarchy at Yale. Foster was certainly never invited inside the sinisterly windowless red sandstone Greek revival home of the Skull and Bones society, the fraternity that counts both Bush the Younger and Bush the Elder as members, though he passed by it daily on his way to the architecture studio.
In the winter of 1961, Yale meant Paul Rudolph, the dapper chairman of the Department of Architecture, a man with a crew cut and a button-down shirt that made him look like an off-duty astronaut. Rudolph’s reputation as a home-grown American modernist had never been higher. Born in Kentucky, Rudolph got his first degree in Alabama. But like Foster he had shown enough promise to be able to quickly make the transition to a larger stage. He moved to Harvard to complete his education and became a student of Walter Gropius at the same time as I.M. Pei and Philip Johnson. It was like being anointed into the church of modernism by its high priest, if not its John the Baptist.
Rudolph joined the US Navy during the Second World War and was stationed at the Navy Yards in Brooklyn. He used the combination of his wartime experience and his relationship with Gropius to develop his own vigorous and inventive approach to architecture, demonstrated by a string of houses that he built in Florida when he was newly qualified. Adapting the navy’s technique for weather-proofing mothballed ships, he had the Cocoon House that he designed on Siesta Key sprayed with plastic roofing film. It was exactly the kind of creative free association that was to shape Foster’s own work. And there are traces of some of Rudolph’s other ideas in Creak Vean, the house that Rogers and Foster designed together when they set up Team Four. Like Rudolph’s School of Forestry at Yale, Creak Vean deals with a vertiginously sloping site by bridging it, creating a main entrance at high level and then stepping down towards the main floor. Its grassy cascade of steps, however, is derived from Foster’s memory of Alvar Aalto’s work at Saynatsalo in Finland.
Appointed to run Yale’s architecture programme in 1958 – on the basis of his buildings rather than his track record as a teacher – Rudolph moved his practice to New Haven. By the time that Foster arrived, Rudolph had given the school the sense of direction it had previously lacked. He was attracting every famous architectural name that he could persuade to stop by to deliver a lecture or pass judgement on the work of his students. He invited the most formidable practitioners to sit on the juries that were a feature of teaching at Yale, and he argued furiously with them in front of the students. There wasn’t any other school in America that had the ambition and the cash to do things the way that Yale did.
Rudolph was a homosexual, and charismatic enough to attract attention beyond the architectural compound. In 1962, Vogue sent Elliot Erwitt to Yale to photograph him for a lengthy profile. Erwitt documented Rudolph’s classes, portraying him at work as a teacher and a designer, and as the host of glamorous cocktail parties. Vogue opened the feature with an unforgettable double-page image of Rudolph taken with a lens long enough to bring down a helicopter gunship. Erwitt shows Rudolph standing entirely alone on the roof of one of the most extraordinary of his creations, New Haven’s Temple Street car park, which was built to evoke the melancholy splendour of a ruined Roman aqueduct in massive cast concrete. He is a tiny figure, almost lost in the background of the photograph, until you focus on him, caught standing proudly four-square, arms folded, next to his cherished Jaguar XK 150 coupé, with its white-wall tyres and its wire wheel hubs, looking like a Roman general preparing for a triumph beside his chariot. Framed by his own monumental work, and with the city crowding in around him, it is the personification of the architect as a solitary hero in the Ayn Rand tradition: an individual with a vision, standing alone against the world, ready to follow the dictates of his own genius.
Erwitt’s photographs, and the coverage that Vogue gave them, convey the lustrous glow that Yale bestowed on its students at that time. Foster was to learn from Rudolph not just how to be an architect, but also how to look and behave like one. He dressed like Rudolph, he started to draw like him too, and one day he was going to design a house and a studio for himself, just as Rudolph had done. In the meantime he combined his studies with work as a draughtsman, earning $1.50 an hour in Rudolph’s studio in the attic of his house on High Street, five minutes walk away from Jonathan Edwards College. From the street, you could not tell that there was anything out of the ordinary going on behind the nineteenth-century façade of Rudolph’s house, with its Corinthian porch and pedimented windows. Foster describes its interior, planned with a set of complex interlocking stepped levels, as a miniature version of the Art and Architecture Building that Rudolph was working on for Yale at the time. Rudolph wrapped a double-height glass extension around the sides and back of the house, behind a brick wall that defined a courtyard. The interior was studded with salvaged architectural fragments that were used to embellish its rooms. A fragment of a gothic carving of a medieval bishop stood by the window, a Roman senator’s head stared out from the chimney breast, impaled on the end of a stainless steel rod. There were lessons to be learned here on ways of working with historic buildings that may have helped shape Foster’s remodelling of the Royal Academy in London, twenty-five years later, his first exercise in dealing with a significant existing piece of architecture. Like Rudolph in his house, at the Royal Academy Foster could create space out of nowhere by co-opting the gaps around the edge of a building. And also like Rudolph, he was ready to exploit the visual tension between old and new to impressive effect. Rudolph had goatskin rugs slung across the floor, and ‘daring’ furniture made from perspex and foam. The young student from Levenshulme was dazzled.
In the studio itself, there were just six stools and a cushion-strewn conversation pit, in which Rudolph would from time to time gather his assistants for a moment of reflection on whatever project they were working on. These were young men who all dressed exactly like him in narrow ties, button-down shirts and crew cuts.
William Grindereng, one of Rudolph’s former employees who worked in the studio in New Haven, remembers that getting into the office involved negotiating a stairwell that came vertiginously up through the floor in the middle of the room.
There was an element of danger in most of what Rudolph did, both for himself and sometimes for other people. The stairwell came up through the floor. It was just a hole in the floor with no railing around it. The building inspector insisted that he put a railing around it. He said, ‘I’ll move out of this building before I do that.’ He could be very stubborn. He never put a railing around that stairwell.
Potentially even more dangerous than the hole in the floor was the staircase that climbed up one wall of Rudolph’s living room. It took the form of a row of stone blades, cantilevered from the wall and rising a sheer eighteen feet without a handrail of any kind. Henry-Russell Hitchcock, the distinguished architectural historian was seen to come close to disaster on at least one occasion when he attempted to negotiate the steps while somewhat the worse for wear after rather too much bourbon. At another party, James Stirling behaved even worse, relieving himself in full view in the yard beyond the glass wall.
Rudolph’s drawings were remarkably intricate and full of energy, precisely delineated in decisive, scalpel-sharp, hard ink lines that were as dry as a steel engraving. Foster learned the style, and spent hour after hour working on Rudolph’s renderings in the master’s manner. The drawings were very large and, according to Foster, Rudolph used them to test alternative possibilities in his designs, very much in the way that architects use computers today. Various versions of sections of the building under consideration would be drawn up, then tested superimposed in position on the larger drawing, and deleted if appropriate.
Foster learned a lot from Rudolph’s furiously determined energy. ‘He was capable of doing all the design drawings and the details for a project all by himself in the course of a single weekend. In that sense he led by example,’ Foster remembers. Much of Foster’s work consisted of straining his eyes to the point of snow blindness, applying layer upon layer upon layer of ink cross-hatching to build up a patina of shadow and light on Rudolph’s presentation drawings. He went on to work on some of the design drawings for the Art and Architecture Building itself.
In the spare, fluid lines of the pencil sketches that fill Rudolph’s notebooks, you see the inspiration for Foster’s own compulsive drawing. Foster simply can’t stop drawing. He makes drawing part of his conversational technique. Talk to him at lunch, and he picks up scraps of paper and starts drawing to illustrate a point. He draws to help him think and to make notes to himself; in the car that ferries him around London, there is permanently a pad of drawing paper and a row of freshly sharpened pencils, ready and waiting to pin down his fleeting thoughts. He has to write letters, of course, but prefers using drawing as his chosen method of communication. He draws for pleasure, and – as much later, facing cancer surgery, he meticulously recorded every detail he could see from his hospital bed – he draws to achieve peace of mind.
Foster clearly cared a great deal about making a good impression on Rudolph. He pushed himself beyond all limits, working through the night at the drawing board. Rudolph knew this, but he was also ready to exploit weakness in others to get even more out of the disciples in his studio. Foster remembers being reduced almost to tears after one marathon session when Rudolph rejected his efforts with the cutting words, ‘You don’t care enough.’ But beyond the anguish, Foster was capable of filing the incident away for use on the day when he would be on the other side of the drawing board.
The level of debate at Yale provided Foster with a startling insight into an approach to architecture entirely different from what he had known in Manchester. Students at Yale were expected to defend their work in front of a demanding panel of critics. Foster took to it at once. He could put in the hours, and then enjoy having somebody ready to talk about what he had done. For the first time in his education he was really getting to explore the meanings of architecture, beyond the practical, measurable issues. ‘Architecture’, Rudolph told his students, ‘is a process of finding out what you need to know.’
Rudolph was Foster’s first serious teacher, and he gave his student a series of clues about the future. ‘He was a restless explorer of form, and a great critic. His early works were very fresh and inspired,’ says Foster, who has always loyally defended his mentor’s fluctuating reputation. In 2008 he went back to Yale to pay tribute to Rudolph at the rededication of his Art and Architecture Building. Foster and his wife donated over three million dollars to endow a chair at the school, acknowledging his debt to Yale and the United States.
Rudolph was endlessly demanding. ‘If there wasn’t something to look at, a model, or a set of drawings, there was no conversation,’ says Foster. Thomas Beeby, who was at Yale just after Foster, remembers Rudolph as an extraordinary teacher:
Paul could just look at a drawing and read it – read it plus read all of the details, the way it’s structured. He would ask you questions like, what would you think about this building? Imagine walking down this hall and when you get to here, you look at the end and what do you see? This is all about perceptual grasp of what the spaces were like. He had an amazing grasp of three-dimensional space. He was a great teacher and he had an absolute standard; nothing was good enough, because there were always things wrong. The structure didn’t work, the circulation didn’t work, you couldn’t get the trash in, it looked bad, the windows were too high.
A lot of people took it very personally. Rudolph never picked on me. But he could be very cynical and cruel if he wanted to. He would pick on people and he would jump up at the end of the critique. There was a great shuffling at the end not to be the last person because somewhere in the last three persons in the class he would just jump up, yell at you and leave. The last two guys would have no chance. We were always trying to figure out how not to be one of the last three guys.
In fact, there was more to architecture at Yale than posturing and raw ego. It demanded unconditional effort from its students. ‘Yale forced you to concentrate on your own work: to be critically astute about your own work, to look at your own work and to be able to criticise it,’ remembers Beeby. ‘You were on your own, it was just you and the piece of paper. You’re not part of a movement, the guy next door can’t tell you what to do because he’s not going to have a similar project. Yale was all about self-realisation.’
Of the eleven students in the master’s class in Foster’s year, three were British. There was Eldred Evans, a young woman who had been at the Architectural Association and was acknowledged as one of the most gifted of its graduates. Later she would design the Tate Gallery’s Cornish outpost in St Ives. There was Richard Rogers, two years older than Foster, born in Florence in 1933, the eldest son of a doctor with a British passport and an Italian mother. His parents bought a house in Surrey and moved to England just before the Second World War. He didn’t much enjoy his days at boarding school, where he developed a rebellious streak. Subsequently, he studied at the Architectural Association, a school that was everything Manchester was not. And then there was Foster, who quickly, and perhaps surprisingly, developed the ability to act as a spokesman for the others. Rogers, who was dyslexic and could hardly draw beyond a scribble, still recalls Foster, in his commanding manner, presenting the projects that they had worked on together.
Both Rogers and Foster were close to Carl Abbott, one of the American students on the course. Abbott was the owner of a Volkswagen Beetle in which they were able to tour the country, looking at the key modern buildings of America.
A photograph taken of the three of them in the winter of 1961 by Su Rogers shows her husband in the centre, wearing a Russian-style astrakhan hat; Richard is smiling, but looking a little awkward, one hand is curled into a fist, the other hangs at his side. Abbott is on his left, bareheaded, as if he were the fifth Beatle. Foster is on the right, wearing a dark snap-brimmed fedora that doesn’t make him look very much like Frank Sinatra at all. The collar of his hound’s-tooth check coat is turned up against the wind, and he is holding his camera in one hand, level with his waist, its leather case dangling down on a strap. He is unsmiling, and wears a tie: the image of an intense, anxious young professional. Foster looks much happier in the photographs that show him at work on the top floor of the Art and Architecture Building.
There was something of a divide between the British and the Americans in their shared studio. The British were a little older, and preferred to debate and to argue rather than to draw. They saw themselves as more mature, and more like professionals than their US counterparts – a pretension which, not surprisingly, was the cause of some irritation. After one episode of more than usually provocative Anglo-Saxon prevarication, a placard appeared over their drafting tables. ‘Stop talking, start drawing,’ it demanded. The British struck back with a slogan of their own on the other side of the studio that urged the Americans to ‘Start Thinking’.
In fact, as M.J. Long recalls, there were other times when American patience with the anglophilia of Rudolph’s Yale wore thin. When Jane Drew, the British architect working alongside Le Corbusier on the job of designing the less inspired parts of Chandigarh, came to lecture, she was greeted by a banner hanging from one of the windows of the Kahn building bearing the words Et Tu Jane Drew? in exasperation at the arrival of what they assumed to be yet another condescending Brit.
Abbott, however, stayed close to the British. He saw Foster when he was working in San Francisco, and when Team Four started he came over to London and worked in the office for a while. Abbott remembers sitting in Hampstead listening to the radio, and having to come to terms with the news that Kennedy had just been shot dead.
There were several other British faces at Yale. Su Rogers was at the School of Planning, on the way to converting herself into an architect after her sociology degree at the London School of Economics. Colin St John Wilson, who would one day build the British Library – and marry M.J. Long – was teaching there. And James Stirling, Eldred Evans’ lover at the time, was a visiting critic.
Yale turned out to be the place that shaped all three of the men, Foster, Rogers and Stirling, who were to dominate Britain’s architectural landscape in the 1970s and 1980s. For all their differences in style and background, Rogers and Foster became close friends immediately. They worked together, sharing studio space and collaborating on projects. Each offered the other a skill that they did not themselves possess, and they began to talk about establishing an architectural practice together when their student days were over. Even though it has diverged over the years, their architecture has retained an essential range of common interests. It was Stirling who recommended Team Four to Peter Parker, the client for their most important commission, the Reliance Controls factory in Swindon. And it was Stirling who was the most outspoken judge in the competition for the Newport School in South Wales, won by Eldred Evans, that Foster entered and lost. Later, Stirling wrote Foster an uncharacteristically enthusiastic letter complimenting him on the new Sackler Galleries at the Royal Academy.
The first brief Rudolph set Foster was for a school. Rudolph, who three years earlier had designed just such a school in Sarasota, was impressed by what Foster produced. Foster, he said, was ‘thinking like an architect, even if he did draw trees that looked like cauliflowers’. The school was followed by a design for an office tower, which was again a brief based on a project that Rudolph himself had worked on in 1960: the Blue Cross, Blue Shield offices in Boston. Foster, in response to Louis Kahn’s famous dictum about buildings being divided between served and servant spaces, conceived of making the useable office floors free of structural columns, intrusive stairwells and washrooms. Instead, the ‘served’ floors spanned between pairs of ‘servant’ towers to which stairs, lifts and washrooms were confined. It set a precedent that Foster was later to apply to the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC) headquarters.
Foster and Rogers collaborated on the next project set by Rudolph: the design for a group of research laboratories for the Yale campus. ‘This is an urban problem. It is also the problem of the architect, as planners and developers have failed to rebuild our cities. They are obsessed with numbers (people, money, acreage, units, cars, roads, etc) and forget life itself and the spirit of man,’ Rudolph wrote in his unusually discursive brief for the students. Their proposal took the form of a megastructure, stepping towards the existing campus buildings. A continuous series of buildings, running one into another, was organised around a spine of lower structures that housed car parks, and cafés, with the laboratories radiating off it.
What is most striking about Yale in Rudolph’s time is that he produced students with wildly divergent outlooks on architecture. Some, like Foster, came away more convinced than ever about the essential rightness of modernism. But others who were there at almost the same time reacted violently against it. Alan Greenberg, who graduated a year after Foster, taught himself how to design in a grand country house classical manner reminiscent of Edwin Lutyens. Stanley Tigerman, and Bob Stern, who went on to orchestrate Disney’s extensive architectural patronage for Michael Eisner in a hubristic collision of low- and highbrow, started looking for stronger architectural flavours than the followers of Walter Gropius could conceivably offer. Stern, who eventually became Yale’s dean of architecture, has presided over an equally diverse school, attracting the Prince of Wales’ favourite, Leon Krier, as well as Zaha Hadid, to teach and lecture.
Rudolph was not just running the school, he was preoccupied first with the design of Yale’s new Art and Architecture Building, and then with realising the commission that should have been his first masterwork. Planned from 1958 onwards, the project was in essence an essay in the baroque version of modernism, characterised by deep hollowed-out voids carved into a big concrete mass, marked by the corduroy concrete ribbing that in Rudolph’s declining years was to become his overworked signature. But as Foster later came to realise, it was a building that at heart was a paraphrase of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Larkin Guaranty offices in Buffalo. For purists, this was moving by quite some distance too far away from the refined simplicity of the pioneering modernists. For those who were not fond of concrete, there was no respite from the harshness of the material. In summer it was too hot, in winter it was too cold. The orange carpet grew an alarming coat of mould. And some painters complained that the ceilings were too low and their studios too dark for their canvases.
As soon as Rudolph left, his successor Charles Moore announced that he disapproved of the building wholeheartedly because it was such a personal manifestation for a non-personal use. Six faculty members and sixty-two students went a lot further, and signed a petition demanding that the university move them out of the building immediately. Dean Keller, the professor of painting and drawing, wrote to the Yale Daily News supporting them. He called the building ‘a total failure’, and produced a withering critique of Rudolph’s work, and indeed of his approach to architecture and his personality.
When I asked innocently why sculptors were put in low-ceilinged rooms underground, and why rabbit warrens with thin strips of windows next to the ceiling were to be the studios of the painters, I was looked on with, let us say, polite contempt.
The architect could have arranged his studios on the north side, and made adequate space. He never had the slightest interest in the painters’ problem. And as for the sculptors, it would seem that he’d never heard of them. The architects as usual came off best, but even they had problems … it’s a dangerous building, ill conditioned for air, which is fetid.
Moore weighed into Rudolph with almost as much ferocity. ‘Mr Rudolph is an important architect, who works as an individual, and ran the school that way. He did things by himself, and seemed to make people like it.’ Certainly Rudolph was not a man to share responsibility for anything with anybody. He told Architectural Forum in April 1958 that ‘Gropius may be wrong in believing that architecture is a cooperative art. Architects were never meant to design together. It’s either your work, or it’s his.’
There was something about Rudolph’s personality that came close to self-sabotage. Foster describes him as supremely self-confident but at the same time shy to the point of catatonia. ‘I remember that he asked a group of us back to his house one night. He got us there, sat us down, and then couldn’t find anything to say to us. And as the silence dragged on, it got harder and harder for anybody to break it. He was trying to be nice, but outside work, he felt lost, and it made him even more difficult.’ Rudolph was regarded as brusque, quick to take offence and emotionally needy.
As soon as the Art and Architecture Building was finally finished in 1964, Rudolph left Yale. According to Vincent Scully, Rudolph was heartbroken when the distinguished architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner made it clear in his speech at the inauguration what he thought of the building.
At the height of the campus unrest of 1967, the Art and Architecture Building was badly damaged by a fire started by what Rudolph’s obituary in the New York Times described as group of student arsonists, and subsequently unsympathetically altered. In fact, the New Haven Fire Department never found conclusive evidence of the fire having been started deliberately. What began the arson theory was a student-published leaflet circulating on campus shortly before the fire gutted two floors of the building, asking ‘Why Has Yale Not Gone Up in Smoke? See the Art and Architecture See Every Building See them Soon,’ it urged, in a way that many understood as a threat that was soon to be substantiated. Of course, if the Art and Architecture Building was not deliberately torched by its occupants it suggests that Rudolph’s building immolated itself through some undiagnosed electrical fault, not really a prospect that could be seen as much more comforting.
After the fire Rudolph’s reputation tipped into a steep decline, which accelerated as he completed a series of increasingly formulaic brutalist concrete buildings, and some unlikely high-rise neo-orientalist work in Jakarta in which he seemed to be suggesting that the appropriate way to make office towers in the tropics was by stacking vernacular-style huts thirty or forty at a time in a form that could be interpreted as referring to a pagoda. He died in 1997. Only now, forty years after the fire, has the Art and Architecture Building been properly restored, and a real attempt been made to make a case for Rudolph as a pivotal figure in post-war American architecture. It’s the kind of trajectory that can lie in wait for any architect whose work achieves a certain prominence, Foster included, as history starts to evaluate their late work against the background of an earlier career. What happened to Rudolph had already happened to Wright.
Nearly three decades later, after Foster had established his international reputation with the completion of the HSBC’s tower, Rudolph found himself being cruelly overshadowed by his former student. While he was building a pair of boldly modelled mirror glass office towers for the disgraced Australian businessman, Alan Bond, in Hong Kong he was asked if he had been influenced by Foster. His answer is as equivocal, and as prickly as you would expect:
Not really, no. How should I put that? It simply was not on the cards. The Norman Foster building is hung, first of all, as you know, although you don’t sense that it is hung. That is one of its great disappointments, mainly because everything comes down to the ground. How can you have a hung building if everything comes down to the ground? The thing happens to be on a sloping piece of land and Norman Foster never figured out how to relate his modules, which are so demanding, to come down to the diagonal. How can you have a hung building if everything comes down to the ground, for God’s sake? It is open at the bottom, in the middle. On either side there are cores and all these little goddam cores come down to the ground.
Rudolph went on to question the approach of two of his most famous students:
Mechanical systems and structural systems are exact opposites. The structural system can be very regular, as we all know. As to the mechanical system, anybody who has looked inside a Ford knows that it’s a very irregular thing, and so it is with a building. I am interested in the play between the two. That’s one reason why Norman Foster’s work, and also Rogers’ buildings are so fascinating for me. I am writing an article on Foster’s building in Hong Kong because he has juxtaposed the mechanical system to the structural system. He controls it very very well. On many levels it’s a marvellous building.
The celebration of the mechanical system, illustrated at the Beaubourg with Rogers’ building, now that is a different matter. Nobody can say that buildings are better or worse because of their articulation of the parts. Nobody can say that a building that shows all of its mechanical systems is better than a building that doesn’t show any of it. You simply cannot do that. It’s not just mechanical systems, you can’t say that a building that shows its structure is better than one that doesn’t. It seems to me that it has to be implied and that forces have to be resolved. The literal showing of the structure isn’t necessarily better.
Norman Foster’s building is finally an impossible building in Hong Kong in spite of the fact that I love it. There is nothing for you really, because it’s so insistent about one way of looking at something. This damn module going on and on is so tense, you have to leave it. I’m trying to figure out why the module was taken to the degree that he did, vertically, horizontally and so forth, it’s just impossible.
If Rudolph taught architecture as a practical, not to say physical art, a matter of heroic wrestling with form, there were other influential figures that Foster came into contact with at Yale who offered different, more cerebral insights into understanding architecture. After Rudolph, Yale’s biggest draw, and not just for architecture students, was the showman historian and critic Vincent Scully, a scholar whose bravura lectures could include as many as seven slide projectors operated simultaneously by a dexterous assistant. More than once Scully was so distracted by his performance that he lost track of where he was and fell off the lecture-theatre stage in mid-flow of an exegesis of the greatness of Frank Lloyd Wright. M.J. Long once saw him pick himself off the floor and go back to his theme without missing a beat, despite sustaining a minor flesh wound to the forehead. And it was certainly Scully that set Foster off on his journey across America to see every Wright building that he could. That journey was what tilted Foster towards Wright, and distanced him a little from his previous regard for Le Corbusier. Scully is the man who once went head to head in an argument with Norman Mailer in the pages of the professional magazine Architectural Forum in defence of modernism, accusing the novelist of ‘lazy potboiling paragraphs’. Later he confessed to feeling defeated by Mailer’s depiction of the heroes of modern architecture leaving man ‘isolated in a landscape of empty psychosis’, a proposition which he felt unable to challenge.
During Foster’s time at Yale, Scully was fighting to save New York’s glorious Pennsylvania Station from demolition. When, despite his efforts and those of many other protestors, it had gone, Scully memorably suggested, ‘Once you entered the city like a god. Now we scuttle in like rats.’ Scully provided a hugely entertaining revisionist commentary on the history of modernism. Foster remembers him as an insightful critic, as interested in talking about the comparisons between the Magnificent Seven and the Seven Samurai, showing at the local movie theatre, as he was discussing Frank Lloyd Wright.
When Foster arrived, Scully had just delivered his famous attack on the rebuilding of Manhattan’s Park Avenue and the impact of SOM’s Lever House, Walter Gropius’s Pan Am tower and Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram building on it. He called it ‘the Death of the Street’, and the phrase was to resonate around the world of architecture. Scully was mounting a frontal assault on contemporary architecture. It did not matter how distinguished an individual work of architecture might be as an isolated object, for Scully, it still had to respect the urban landscape and its essential character. A street overwhelmed by high-rise towers that turn it into a ravine, or disrupt it by opening up empty plazas, is no longer a street. And a city without streets is not a city.
Also in evidence at Yale in Foster’s period was Philip Johnson, the sardonic ringmaster of American architecture, wealthy enough to build his thesis project at Harvard for his house at New Canaan, to which Foster and the others were invited more than once. Johnson always had an ability to find new talent, and he went out of his way to connect with the British contingent at Yale. Later, Foster flew Johnson and his companion, David Whitney, in his Jet Ranger helicopter to see the newly finished Sainsbury Centre. Johnson was working on the Crystal Cathedral in California at the time, and was fascinated by the Sainsbury’s steel tracery and the way it filtered daylight.
The third of the key intellectual influences on Foster in his student days, Serge Chermayeff, arrived at Yale at the start of his second semester to start teaching the master’s course alongside Rudolph. Chermayeff, a Russian born in Grozny, in what is now Chechnya, had a career that can only be called colourful. His oil-rich millionaire father sent him to public school in England. The Russian Revolution left him penniless, and he spent five years after leaving Harrow working variously as a professional ballroom dancer and a journalist. After a period in Latin America, he became a designer for Waring and Gillow; then, having married his employer’s daughter, he turned himself into an architect through sheer force of will, eventually going into partnership with the German refugee Erich Mendelsohn. While Mendelsohn and Chermayeff were working in London, they built one of the few authentic pieces of International Style architecture in Britain, a house in Chelsea. Many decades later Foster was to remodel it for Paul and Helen Hamlyn.
Chermayeff, who was in his sixties by the time that he got to Yale, was more interested in the social and theoretical underpinning to design than in building architectural sculpture for its own sake. Foster was dazzled by his ideas. ‘Chermayeff was an intellectual. You could have all the visuals you wanted, but he wanted to know why you were doing your projects. Dialogue and discussion were more important to him than the drawings.’
In Foster, Chermayeff saw a potential disciple, and he tried to encourage him to stay on at Yale as a research fellow after he completed his master’s degree. He gave him an early draft of Community and Privacy to read. This was the book that he was going to publish with Christopher Alexander, exploring settlement patterns, and their relevance to contemporary planning.
Community and Privacy, strikingly designed by Chermayeff’s graphic designer son Ivan, is less an academic thesis, and more of a call to arms along the lines of Rachel Carson’s onslaught against pesticides in her book, Silent Spring, that was first published in the same year. After its perhaps surprising dedication to Walter Gropius ‘with affection, admiration and gratitude’, Community and Privacy begins by quoting the ringing words of President Kennedy delivered in a message to Congress in the spring before Foster arrived in New Haven:
Within 15 years our population will rise to 235 million. And by the year 2000 to 300 million. Most of this increase will occur in and around suburban areas. We must begin now to lay the foundations for livable, efficient and attractive communities of the future.
Land adjoining urban centers has been engulfed by urban development at the astounding rate of about one million acres a year. But the result has been haphazard and inefficient suburban expansion, and continued setbacks in the central cities’ desperate struggle against blight and decay. Their social and economic base has been eroded by the movement of middle and upper income families to the suburbs, by the attendant loss of retail sales, and by the preference of many industrial firms for outlying locations.
Our policy for housing and community development must be directed toward the accomplishment of three basic national objectives.
First, to renew our cities, second to provide decent housing for all our people, third to encourage a prosperous and efficient construction industry as an essential component of general economic prosperity and growth.
This is the kind of discussion that prefigures the way Foster subsequently engaged with the future development of the city. For Chermayeff, the real problem was with mass culture, or what he called ‘the glitter and debilitating chaos of Henry Miller’s air-conditioned nightmare’.
In Chermayeff’s apocalyptic vision:
in almost every city the pleasure of participation in city life through leisurely pedestrian movement is lost in the turmoil of cars. There may indeed come a time when travel and communication if left unchecked will make the city environment so diffuse that active urban life, as it once was, will disappear. It is even possible that unused leisure and purposeless mobility will be so abundant that they will kill all but museum experience of the city-born arts. The comprehension of events and the delight in beauty that humanity rich and poor alike may derive from its physical environment cannot be achieved in a condition of anarchy.
So dire was the situation that ‘Even housewives are protesting about what is happening to the city,’ claimed Chermayeff, clearly no new man.
Chermayeff offered a number of remedies to this wide-ranging series of crises facing the city. In his view, it is ‘only through the restored opportunity for first-hand experience that privacy gives, that health and sanity can be brought back to the world of the mass culture … Privacy is most urgently needed and most critical in the place where people live … Traffic and noise must be treated as invaders. Man will have to design and build his own ecology.’
Chermayeff’s answer to the problem of planning: ‘It is urban hierarchy, demonstrated through an apparently endless series of diagrams exploring nodes and networks.’
It was a powerful manifesto, arguing in essence for an understanding of design at the level of the city rather than the individual building, and one which left an important mark on Foster. Initially, it was in his academic work. With Chermayeff’s encouragement, he worked alongside a group of his fellow students on the City of Tomorrow competition, sponsored by the Ruberoid Company, that set out to shape the future of urbanism. This, his last project of the year at Yale, was based on many of the ideas contained in Community and Privacy, but it also provided a direction for his later career. In Chermayeff’s writings, Foster found a distillation of the thoughts that he had begun to form in his speculations about urbanism. According to Chermayeff:
Maybe the day is not far off when planners, designers, development promoters, and other professionals recognize the mere fact that the space between buildings is just as important for the life of the urbanite as the buildings and that they act consequently. If the total land use is planned scrupulously to achieve an optimum use at any level, the inner city could hold just as many vertical, multi-purpose buildings of short term occupation as it could homes on ground level for families with children. Working as active parts in the technological urban context, these ground floor homes could be successful where suburbs have failed.
Foster and the rest of his group of students worked together on a sophisticated and highly accomplished master plan for a city that was based on Chermayeff’s ideas of how a level of density that offered the vitality and intensity of a genuine metropolitan culture could still sustain the essentials of civilised life. As well as embodying a set of planning principles, it resulted in a very professional-looking large-scale model that could almost have emerged from the Foster + Partners office of today. The design was fleshed out by specific architectural proposals. In a knowing gesture, Foster inserted a version of the office tower that he had designed earlier at Yale, in his first semester, as the model for workplaces in the new city. Alongside them, the project included residential areas in the form of a high-density, anti-suburban model that was a realisation of some of the diagrams that were later to be published in Community and Privacy as a book.
Some of the other students were less impressed by Chermayeff’s doctrinaire austerity than Foster. Thomas Beeby remembers of Chermayeff:
He was this arch-functionalist, right? So you had to justify everything you did functionally. He would stop and snort and carry on endlessly about how stupid people were. You had to sort of listen to all this. You were not allowed to do design, we constructed diagrams for 85 per cent of his studio and in the end he would let you design something that was supposedly a functional building. We had this sort of subversive thing going where he would get all his diagrams. Then the last part, which would be this enormous model, which was a stadium complex. It had to be a group project, it was part of the approach. Men don’t work alone anymore, because that is what geniuses do, and architects are not geniuses.
Yale, as Foster remembers it, was a pressure cooker. The hours that trainee hospital doctors put in when they are on call have nothing on the addiction to work of a class of architectural students motivated by a teacher as demanding as Paul Rudolph. There was a sofa in the graduate studio, and students took turns to catch some sleep on it as they worked into the night, occasionally interrupted by Rudolph’s habit of coming in unannounced for impromptu midnight tutorials. It was a pattern that was to set the pace for the twenty-four-hour working day at the Foster studio in Battersea, which never closes.
Every chance they got between the punishing schedule of design projects, round-the-clock work and presentations, Abbott and the British contingent would set off to see America, and all the key pieces of architecture that they had heard about on the way. They tracked down every Frank Lloyd Wright building within reach of New Haven that they could find, and talked their way inside most of them.
Money was short, so Abbott found himself having to pay for most of the petrol for the Volkswagen. Sometimes they stayed four to a room in cheap motels. When they got to Falling Water, Wright’s most spectacular tour de force of domestic architecture, Abbott had to show Foster the gap in the fence, so that they could break in and save the price of buying tickets. They were stopped by the docents on the way out, but by this time they had already seen what they wanted and it was too late to make them pay.
They drove down to New York for bruisingly dry Martinis with James Stirling at the bar of the Four Seasons, the restaurant in the base of the Seagram Building designed by Philip Johnson. The maître d’ spotted Stirling as he was slipping an ashtray into his overcoat pocket, and equally discreetly put it on the bill. They looked at Frank Lloyd Wright’s recently opened Guggenheim Museum. They went to Greenwich Village to listen to jazz in smoke-filled rooms. In Chicago, they pored over the work of Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright’s mentor, and looked closely at the retractable sliding fire escapes in back alleys. They also looked at the Monadnock Building, designed at the end of the nineteenth century by Burnham and Root, as a forerunner of the modern skyscraper, and went to genuflect at the office of Mies van der Rohe.
Foster was looking not just at the acknowledged masterpieces. Using film as sparingly as possible to save money, he was photographing gas stations and Airstream caravans and crop-spraying equipment, and all the aspects of the American industrial vernacular that inspired so many British architects with its anonymous and effortless confidence.
They drove down to Philadelphia to hear Louis Kahn speak at the University of Pennsylvania in his semi-mystical way about allowing a brick to be what a brick wanted to be. Foster certainly learned lessons from Kahn, who had begun to explore what the impact of Buckminster Fuller’s approach to geometry might be on high-rise architecture.
Foster and Rogers made the first halting steps towards starting an architectural practice together while they were still at Yale. Rogers had a friend in London, a landscape architect called Michael Branch, who had a modest plot of land and wanted to build on it. Foster and Rogers began to work on the design in a house on New Haven’s outskirts, borrowed from the sculptor Naum Gabo, a friend of Su’s parents.
Foster has a surviving drawing from that period on a fragment of yellow drafting paper. It shows a house strongly influenced by Louis Kahn, anchored by a massive chimney, and divided into distinct blocks. But Branch had trouble getting the money to build and the project seemed to peter out.
Foster graduated from Yale in the summer of 1962, in a marquee on the lawn at the centre of the university. It was a ceremony overshadowed by the glamorous lustre of the President of the United States, just ahead of the Cuban missile crisis. John F. Kennedy came to Yale to collect an honorary degree, and to deliver a speech that spoke of America’s obligations to the world.
Foster stayed on the East Coast for a few more months. His town-planning qualification from Manchester got him a job with Pedersen and Tilney, a local firm working on urban renewal schemes in New Haven, that was his first practical experience of working beyond the scale of the individual building. Foster helped to find a way to secure Federal funding for a Pedersen and Tilney project in Massachusetts, arguing that the area had been blighted by a nearby airbase.
Then he drove to San Francisco by way of Cape Canaveral in a little sports car, an MGA, to work for Anshen and Allen. In those days they were regionalists, trying to find a contemporary architectural language to express the essential character of the Bay Area. In their hands it came to be associated with big roofs with swooping overhangs that seemed to owe a debt to Japanese construction. Foster worked for them on a competition to design the University of Southern California Santa Cruz campus.
He’d been there six months when a letter arrived from Rogers, who was by this time back in Britain. The house that they had started to design together for Michael Branch seemed to have finally come to life; Branch had decided to go ahead. And there was the prospect of more work for Su Rogers’ father. Marcus Brumwell, who ran an advertising agency, had also been instrumental in setting up the Design Research Unit with Misha Black and Milner Grey, the first substantial design consultancy in Britain. The time was right for them to get on with their plans for starting an architectural practice together. Would Foster come back to Britain as soon as possible to get things started?
‘I assumed that Su had written it. She wrote all the letters,’ remembers Foster, who, despite his fondness for America, quickly decided that he had nothing to lose by giving the partnership a try. ‘I could always go back to America,’ he says.
And so he set off for Britain, this time taking the long way round. It was a journey that involved him making his first jet flight in a Comet 4B on Mexicana’s Golden Aztec route from Los Angeles to Mexico City. ‘It was such a beautiful aircraft to look at. It was so beautiful on the outside that even inside the cabin, it transformed the whole experience of flying.’ Foster went from Mexico to the West Indies, and from there flew by way of Brussels, back to Manchester to spend a few days with his parents. He had kept in touch through sporadic letter writing over the last eighteen months, but they were surprised to see him back so soon after he had got a job in San Francisco, and even more concerned to see him almost immediately disappearing again, off to London to start his own architectural practice. ‘Perhaps I had not been very clear about how I explained what I was doing. They had imagined I would be staying longer in Manchester.’
Team Four was a name carefully chosen to suggest an aversion to narcissistic self-publicity. It was hinting broadly at a collaborative approach, but also referred back to the distinguished theoretical group Team Ten, that had tried to rewrite the agenda for post-war architecture. It also had the not entirely uncoincidental echo of the kind of name that a pop group might use. Team Four lasted barely four years, from the day in 1963 when it was established in Wendy Cheeseman’s flat in Hampstead, to its dissolution amid some bickering in 1967, just about the point when the firm ran out of work. Team Four produced only a handful of buildings, notably the house for Marcus and Rene Brumwell in Cornwall, and a now-demolished electronics factory in Swindon for Reliance Controls, along with some relatively modest houses in Camden Mews, and the so-called Skybreak House in Hertfordshire that achieved a moment of notoriety when it was used as one of the interior sets for Stanley Kubrick’s Clockwork Orange.
But even if it was brief, the Team Four experience served to ignite the careers of two of the key figures in the architecture of the last years of the twentieth century, and the start of the twenty-first. And it was in the Team Four office that Norman Foster met his first wife, the architect Wendy Cheeseman. Rogers, who introduced them, had known both Wendy and her older sister Georgie – also an architect – for years. Both the Cheeseman and Rogers families lived in Surrey, and Rogers got to know Georgie when they were studying at the Architectural Association. Wendy had been at what was then called the Regent Street Polytechnic in London. After graduating in 1963, she worked for a while in a small Bloomsbury office. Her economical, coolly elegant pencil drawings for her diploma project reveal an accomplished draughtswoman, with a sophisticated approach to architecture that clearly made a substantial contribution to Team Four. When Rogers came to consider setting up the practice, he invited the two sisters to join him and Norman as partners.
All of the people Rogers had lined up had practical advantages and could bring something to the practice that Rogers could not. Wendy Cheeseman had the flat in Hampstead Hill Gardens with a large front room that would make a useful office for the practice. Georgie was the only one of them who was fully qualified and registered as an architect, and so an essential member of the practice if Team Four were to be legally entitled to call themselves architects. And Foster could not only draw, he had a way of getting things done.
The office was on the first floor at 16B Hampstead Hill Gardens. Initially, Wendy lived in the room at the back, keeping the kitchen as part of her private domain. Foster remembers being less than impressed to discover that getting to the office involved walking through the kind of domestic door that normally gave access to a bedsit. But by 1964 Norman and Wendy had got married, disappearing off in their lunch hour one day for the ceremony, with no family and just a few friends present, then stopping off on the way back to Hampstead Hill Gardens from the registry office for a picnic on the Heath.
‘We worked very closely together, and then quickly became close in every way,’ says Foster. ‘We decided to get married first, to present it as a fait accompli, and then to have the celebrations later.’
Just before Christmas in 1965, Wendy gave birth to their first child, Ti Foster. She named him for Jack Kerouac, author of On the Road, a book that was important to her. Kerouac’s family and friends had always called him Ti-jean, and Wendy took the name for her son. It was a home birth, a reflection of Wendy’s continuing antipathy towards modern medicine.
By this time, the Fosters had made a family home not far from the office in Hampstead. They moved from Lyndhurst Gardens to a house in Thurlow Road, and then again to Frognal, very close by, where the sculptor Anthony Caro was a neighbour. Caro became a close friend and, eventually, a collaborator on the design for the Millennium Footbridge across the Thames.
When Foster and Wendy started living together, they had to share their first home with an increasingly busy office and a secretary, Sophie, who happened to be the distinguished critic Herbert Read’s daughter, and kept a large Afghan hound under her desk. Foster would walk in through one door from the back of the flat in the mornings, and meet people coming in from the outside door. On one occasion, the bedroom was pressed into service as a meeting room, with the bed transformed into a conference table with the addition of a hurriedly fabricated plywood cover. The sound of typing issuing from the bedroom was used to provide a reassuring suggestion of administrative competence.
There was a steady flow of students in search of work, many of whom would eventually do very well on their own after spending time in the office.
‘We were camping out there, and eventually the office took over the whole space,’ remembers Foster.
To subsidise the practice in its early days, Foster started teaching as a part-timer at the Regent Street Polytechnic and at the Architectural Association. The Cheeseman sisters, though outwardly financially secure – their father was an insurance broker who had been chairman of Lloyds – were fiercely independent, and determined to make their own way without relying on family money.
Foster recalls:
We were doing buildings for people who were our guinea pigs because they happened to be friends and relations. They were small domestic projects which are the most difficult things to do because you don’t really have the experience. You’re learning on the project. In some ways that makes you more resourceful. You end up perhaps being more self-auditing than if you had the benefit of experience.
Some of the tics that have distinguished Foster’s subsequent working methods were already present in the Team Four days. For a project to extend Wendy’s mother’s house in Surrey, one unfortunate student assistant remembers being asked to make models of variation after variation on a fireplace, until they reached a total of fourteen.
Georgie, who had a young family to concentrate on, did not stay long. Her rapid departure deprived the practice of its only qualified architect, which left the survivors professionally vulnerable. To Foster’s fury, Team Four found themselves under investigation by the professional practice committee of the Architects Registration Council of the United Kingdom who warned them that, since they had no registered architects in their partnership, they were breaking the law by calling themselves Team Four Architects. Foster was all for refusing to deal with their tormentors except through lawyers.
In the event, however, he went back to his old employer, John Beardshaw, for help. Beardshaw agreed to give them the umbrella of professional status by offering a loose association with his London office until they managed to get their own qualifications in place. They also started looking for a replacement for Georgie, but all the prospective qualified candidates baulked at the possibility, despite the food and drink they were plied with.
The very first project Foster built is a tiny glass capsule sunk into a green Cornish headland overlooking the estuary of the Fal River. Foster and Richard Rogers worked on it together in 1964 when they were partners in Team Four. Their client, Marcus Brumwell, wanted a place in which to shelter out of the wind and to watch sailing regattas on summer weekends. It was somewhere for him to make tea in the sun, to sit and read, or listen to the Third Programme on his portable wireless while he and his wife, Rene, waited for Team Four to hurry up and finish Creak Vean, the house that they had commissioned from them. It was a house that Brumwell paid for by selling the canvas that he had bought in the 1930s from a penniless Piet Mondrian, when the artist was briefly in London on his way through Britain to America.
In other hands the shelter project would have been called a gazebo, and would no doubt have turned out looking like a garden shed. Team Four gave it a sunken profile and covered it with a glass canopy that was opened by sliding it back, like the cockpit of a Spitfire, as if it were the crashed aircraft that Foster remembered from his wartime childhood. It was modest in scale, but Team Four asked Tony Hunt, the structural engineer who was later to play a vital role in the design of the Sainsbury Centre, to have a careful look at the foundations in order to ensure that its concrete base didn’t go disappearing down the hill on a mudslide. When I saw it, ten years after Brumwell’s death, the glass was discoloured and stained with moss. Watched over by cows and sea gulls, the shelter had half folded into the landscape like the ruin of a neolithic barrow, translated to the twentieth century.
Team Four was too unstable a mix of personalities to last for long. Architectural partnerships that survive are the ones in which each partner brings something different to the practice, and does not feel threatened by competition from the others. With Rogers and Foster, no matter how close they had been at Yale, there was an inevitable jockeying for position. Both of them were determined to make their own way. Both of them were natural leaders. But both of them were in the slightly uncomfortable position of feeling to some extent dependent on their wives. Both wanted to design. Both wanted to shape the practice. As Paul Rudolph had once said, ‘It’s either your work, or it’s the other guy’s.’
‘All the things that brought us together, had in them the seeds that would provoke us to go in our own directions in a relatively short period of time,’ says Foster. The immediate cause of the rift was the ambiguous status of Richard’s wife Su in the office. Never trained as an architect, she had not formally been made a partner at the time Team Four started, and neither Rogers nor Foster quite knew how to deal with the situation as her interest in architecture and the practice grew. Rather than address the question head-on, they avoided it, and took the decision to dissolve the partnership, dividing what little work there was between them.
It was inevitably a painful dissolution, though without lasting rancour. Foster and Rogers became closer again after Team Four dissolved. For many years they remained identified with a particular moment in British architecture. But both had different ideas about how to turn their shared principles into their own distinct buildings. Foster outlines their differences thus:
Richard is much more interested in the potential for expression, of the structure and the services, and the potential for the dramatisation of that. I’d say that if I tried to make a simple generalisation I’m more interested in the potential for the ways that things can integrate. In other words, at some point someone saw that there was an engine and a chasis, and somehow if you could dissolve the two together, so that they would work together. The way in which a building similarly integrates the different aspects rather than necessarily seeking to dramatise any one of those elements is what interests me.
It’s been a continuing dialogue between them that had a public hearing in a discussion at the home of the architect Robin Spence one night in the 1980s, when Foster and Rogers talked helicopters, with Rogers enthusing about the Bell 47 D1 with its exposed space frame structure, while Foster preferred the more contemporary high-performance fully enclosed skin of Bell Jet Ranger, a contrast that might be seen as encapsulating two different philosophical positions. The 47 D1 shows how every piece relates to every other piece, shows off its components and its connections. The Jet Ranger is an integrated sculptural form, shaped for high performance. Both are beautiful in very different ways. Foster, who has flown both machines, sees the Jet Ranger as the more advanced of the two, and thus the one which has had the greater longevity. That Foster feels more drawn to the perfection of the Jet Ranger, like a huge Brancusi, than to the legibility of a mechanism suggests a mind that is attracted to discipline and tight control, and a personality that looks for expression in objects that may be hard to read.
At the Reliance Controls building, Foster insisted on fixing the fluorescent lights into the corrugations of the metal ceiling, in the same way that the heating is incorporated seamlessly into the floor, doing away with separate fittings. It took a lot more effort, but it had the effect of making them disappear into the background. Rogers could not understand why Foster wanted to do it. A more sophisticated version of the idea would much later provide the starting point for a sequence of low-energy projects in Germany.
Over the next four decades, Foster’s and Rogers’ careers were continually to interact with each other. They would find themselves competing for the same jobs. Every so often they would meet up and discuss working together again, even considering setting up a joint practice. None of these ideas came to anything. But in 1986, when an architectural profession reeling from the onslaught of the Prince of Wales on its competence fought back with a high-profile exhibition of contemporary design at the Royal Academy, it took the form of a three-man show, with equal billing for Foster, Rogers and their one-time tutor at Yale, James Stirling.
Each of them showed one completed and one unbuilt project. Foster gave one room to a spectacular multimedia representation of the newly completed Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, and another to the BBC Radio headquarters in Portland Place, a scheme that was about to fall victim to Margaret Thatcher’s vendetta against the corporation after a huge amount of work had been invested in it. It was cancelled just before the exhibition opened.
Rogers showed the Lloyds building, and a scheme for remodelling London’s relationship with the Thames. There were clear parallels between Lloyds and the Bank, yet also differences. Lloyds used concrete for its structure, while HSBC was made from steel.
As the two practices continued to grow, their approaches diverged more and more. Just how far apart the two architects eventually became can be seen on Wood Street in the City of London, where the two of them each finished office buildings just after the turn of the millennium.
There is no better place to understand the history of postwar British architecture and the way in which one generation has reacted against the previous one. Wood Street was originally created by the Romans as a route to the parade ground of a fort located just outside the city wall. And it has been collecting architectural monuments ever since. In the course of just fifty yards, it boasts a tower designed by Christopher Wren, which is the last surviving relic of a church that originally started out as the royal chapel of the Saxon kings. There is a remarkable police station built in the early 1960s by McMorran & Whitby, in dignified classical style. A Terry Farrell Art Deco-inspired tower rears over the street at one end, demonstrating the high-water mark of the property boom of the 1980s. The next eruption of development came fifteen years later, and is represented by a pair of buildings, one by Rogers, the other by Foster. Richard Rogers’ firm designed a headquarters on the corner of Wood Street, facing towards London Wall at number 88, and, immediately next to it is an office block at number 100 designed by Norman Foster.
Look at these two buildings and you can get a sense of exactly how much two architects who began their careers working together have diverged. Foster has pursued integration in his work. Rogers’ approach, on the other hand, believed in articulation. The Wood Street building explored new territory for Foster. It has a Portland stone façade with a deliberately anonymous, chequer-board rhythm of alternating storey-height stone panels and rectangular glass windows that shift back and forth, one bay at a time, on each level. It is a mannerism calculated to show that this is a building that does not share the sensibility of its more conventional stone-clad neighbour, on the side away from the Rogers building, which plays by the old rules. To underscore the point, Foster has put a vertical black line to cut himself off from that building. He does not touch Rogers, his other neighbour, at all.
On the other side of the air gap from Foster, Rogers has stuck to what his office does best – romantic modernity. By pulling the structure, stairs and lifts out of the basic envelope, he creates a jagged, picturesque skyline. The piece closest to Foster is wall-to-wall glass, in an elegant concrete frame that is braced by gunmetal grey and stainless steel rods.
Round the corner, there is some muscular, exposed cross-bracing, beautifully rendered in stainless steel that has the delicacy of jewellery. There is even a touching little cabbage patch of sprouting red and blue funnels to remind us that this is the work of the firm that built the Pompidou Centre. This being a Rogers building, the cascades of steel stairs like streamers inside are painted bright yellow.
We talk about buildings as if they were individual works of art, to be understood as discrete aesthetic experiences. But in a dense city like London, they can’t exist in isolation. They are inevitably seen as part of a street or in the context of one street interacting with another. And the junction of Foster’s and Rogers’ buildings is centre stage, visible in long views as well as close up. In contrast to his stone front on Wood Street, at the back of the building Foster has scooped out a curved glass skin, hoisted up on a colonnade of raked steel legs. London is a city divided between two kinds of office building: the generic developed for the rental market, and the tailor-made for the owner-occupier. For Foster, the generic projects, like Wood Street, are contextual, the product of a negotiation between site, developer and planners. The specific, like Rogers’ Lloyds building or Foster’s Swiss Re, are exceptions with the potential to develop a more distinctive identity.
In the closing months of 1967, there was no discernable division between Richard Rogers and Norman Foster. Their work as Team Four was apparently indivisible, the product of both their sensibilities, even if the seeds for their divergence were already sown. There has never been, nor could there be, given the nature of their partnership, a dissection of what aspect of the buildings that the two worked on was the product of one more than the other. Team Four had outwardly been seamless. What came next for Foster had to be based on something else.