In the wake of the dissolution of Team Four, Foster and his wife, heavily pregnant with their second son, Cal, set up Foster Associates. It was an ambitious name for a tiny architectural practice consisting of just the two of them, sitting in their Hampstead Hill Gardens studio designing kitchens and bathrooms from their drawing boards while looking out over Hampstead Heath. But at least they didn’t have to sleep in their office. The Fosters had moved out of Hampstead Hill Gardens, leaving what had been Wendy’s flat to the firm. It was a struggle to survive. Foster was still teaching part-time and the office needed whatever work it could get.
One early client was the editor of the Sunday Times magazine, Ron Hall, who lived just around the corner and got them to extend his living room and build a patio. As Hall remembers it, he picked Foster Associates simply because it was the nearest architectural practice to his house when he looked in the telephone directory. Hall suggests that Wendy Foster was the one who did most of the work on his house. There was also a job to design a clothes shop for boys, called the Orange Hand, distinguished by a singularly aggressive logo in the shape of a neon fist. But most of Foster’s apparently limitless energy went into architectural competitions and speculative projects.
Working with Alan Stanton, his first new employee recruited straight after graduating from the Architectural Association, Foster poured everything that he had learned in California from the skinny metal and glass sheds that Charles Eames envisaged as the basis for a new industrial vernacular, into a competition design for a school in Newport. It was a development of the elegant structure of Reliance Controls, and had a deep roof that would later inspire the Sainsbury Centre. Foster didn’t win. James Stirling, who was the most forceful member of the jury, put his considerable weight behind Foster’s classmate at Yale, Eldred Evans. Nevertheless, Foster’s drawings got a lot of attention. A few years later he was nonplussed for a moment when a bright young architect called Spencer de Grey came for a job interview. His portfolio included a school that he had just finished building for a local authority in London that had a very close resemblance to Foster’s unbuilt design for the Newport competition. After pausing for thought, Foster hired de Grey, who has worked with him ever since.
Foster had trouble getting that first key job that every architect starting out on their own needs. He thought about going back to America with Wendy and their children. ‘Everything was a closed shop to us. The universities were done by ex-local authority architects. Local authorities handled housing themselves, and developers just used developers’ architects.’ Despite having won the Financial Times Industrial Architecture Award for the Reliance building, Foster was reduced to writing letters to sympathetic senior architects begging for work, or even for any advice that might lead to getting some work.
But Foster was not giving up. And he certainly wasn’t going to work for anybody else:
It was a latent impatience, I suppose, and a feeling that unless you are doing something, you are not contributing. After spending five years at university, getting a master’s degree in America and teaching, working for somebody else did not seem like the real thing. Given the degree of impatience that I had, and the absolute gut determination to build, I was going to find a way to make a breakthrough.
Stanton remembers Foster’s relentless energy. ‘He would drive us up to Derby in his tiny sports car to look at the Fletcher and Stewart building that we were working on there, a project left over from Team Four, and get us back the same morning in time for coffee. I had never seen anything like Norman’s approach.’
Foster’s experience with Reliance Controls suggested that the best strategy for getting work was to take up a position as the most accomplished and the most professional designer of factories in Britain: ‘The only territory that had not been taken over was industrial architecture, perhaps because it was not posh enough, or not intellectual enough, or because architects did not want to dirty their hands.’ He wasn’t the only young British architect at the time to have spotted the opportunity. Nicholas Grimshaw had a similar strategy.
Through a mix of accident and calculation, Foster turned a chance contact with a client who didn’t believe that he needed an architect at all into a commission that created a building nobody had envisaged, on a site that hadn’t existed, but which, when it was finished, seemed astonishingly assured and startlingly unexpected in its location and its content.
‘Apparently it is a well-scripted route to success. You get a start where nobody has penetrated before, and you command that domain and that allows you to make the leap to other areas,’ says Foster.
One of the students in Foster’s office, Barry Copeland, had a father working for Fred. Olsen Line in Millwall. Copeland casually mentioned that the Olsen organisation was thinking of doing something about installing showers for its workforce. Foster recalls: ‘It was no big deal, they weren’t thinking of using architects, they were talking to builders about getting something straightforward run up in a hurry to placate the dockers.’ Foster had the scent of a job, and was not going to give up until he had it in his grasp. He got the name of Olsen’s dock manager, Mike Thompson, and went to see him.
Foster arrived an hour before the interview and spent the time looking at the ships tied up on the wharf. He had already discovered that Fred. Olsen was a Norwegian family-owned business, whose main trade was with the Canary Islands. On the outward journey, its ships carried a mixed cargo. They came back loaded up with bananas. Olsen combined this trade with holidays and cruises. Thompson was expecting a builder rather than the young architect who came to see him in fashionably long side burns, with a portfolio that included precious little in the way of completed buildings.
‘I asked him to show me what they were doing,’ remembers Foster. ‘I asked him about their future plans, he talked about a social revolution.’ Three years earlier, Lord Devlin had chaired a Royal Commission charged with finding a way to deal with festering labour relations in the docks and modernise the system of casual labour in Britain’s ports that, aside from the arrival of the fork lift, had hardly changed since Nelson’s time. Gangs of dockers were still hired by the day through an intricate network of small employers to unload cargo, ship by ship, with no job security, no pensions, and squalid working conditions. ‘They were treated like animals,’ remembers Foster. But by striking without warning, they could leave food to rot, or cripple Britain’s car industry by holding up deliveries of components. Generally the employers had no option but to settle their claims. In the days before containerisation, pilfering was endemic, and the whole process of loading and unloading became unnecessarily slow, and unjustifiably costly. Harold Wilson’s Labour government believed that the country was being blackmailed by a group of dockers described by Devlin’s committee as ‘wreckers and economic saboteurs’.
The Millwall in which Norman Foster found himself in 1969 was an angry and confrontational place, home to a white working class that saw itself as dispossessed and on the edge of oblivion. Its hinterland was the birthplace of the skinhead cult, scarred by the recurrent street violence associated with Millwall Football Club’s fearsome supporters, and fertile ground for the fascist National Front. The famous communist militant Jack Dash led his last strike there in 1969. It was the place in which Enoch Powell’s wild and inflammatory assault on black immigration, predicting rivers of blood, drew its strongest support. There were marches to Parliament by dockers demanding compulsory repatriation for immigrants.
Foster was disgusted to find segregated lavatories for whites and non-whites. But he set about creating a job for himself, and then produced as coolly elegant a building as he could. With the conviction of an architect whose eyes are fixed on the distant horizon, he suggested that it would wipe away the traces of the class war and the squalor of the past.
Olsen’s new approach was a response to the Devlin plan. In exchange for simplifying the fossilised structure of their working practices, dockers would get regular employment and modern working conditions. The scheme allowed for the introduction of shipping containers that speeded up the unloading and loading process, and made cargo less vulnerable to what was politely termed ‘shrinkage’.
Olsen was planning to build a simple shed to give its workforce the basic amenities that they lacked. Thompson showed Foster his plans, and talked about changing work patterns. Foster looked at the layout. It gave him the chance to launch an attention-grabbing opening gambit. As things stood, he suggested, Olsen was proposing to put its new building in exactly the wrong place, one that would be a costly waste of money:
‘You have all your people working on the quayside, yet you are talking about putting the amenities over here. When they have a tea break or go for a shower, do you realise how long it will take for them to walk there and back? Have you factored that in? Aside from convenience, time is obviously money.’
Foster pointed at another site, directly on the waterfront. ‘Why not put it here?’ he asked.
‘Ah well, you are not to know, the Port Authority is building two huge sheds there, with a big gap between the two,’ replied Thompson. ‘So I asked, “What is that big gap for?”’ Thompson didn’t know, but he was intrigued enough to challenge Foster to find out, and in effect to give him two weeks to draw up a more considered plan to deal with the site.
Foster discovered that the Port of London Authority had decided to build its two sheds as cheaply as it could. Instead of fireproofing the walls between them to stop fire spreading, they planned to leave a gap wide enough to stop the flames. With the right construction techniques, the gap could be a good place to build not just the dockers’ locker room and showers, but also the offices that the management needed.
Foster carried the Olsen block in his mind everywhere he went for the entire twelve intense months that it took to design and build it. He made the sketches, and drew the kind of perspectives that attempt to convey an architect’s ideas to his client. And he churned out the grinding stack of production drawings that the builder needed to get started. In a big architectural office, there are assistants to work out how to pack insulation into the roof, and how to fit two large pieces of glass together carefully so that they don’t let in the rain, or crack in strong winds. When an office has successfully done things before, it has precedents to rely on to save time and effort. It’s the way that architects develop a signature. They treat doors and windows the same way in successive projects, they develop a confidence in using certain techniques because they have seen them work before. In the early days of Foster Associates, it wasn’t like that. Everything was new, everything was a risk. Everything needed to be tested and prototyped. Foster had to go out to find the components that he needed to be able to build his drawings.
It’s the most truly hands-on project I have ever gone through, in terms of a totality, in terms of being the guy on site as well as doing the full-size drawings. There are some things you never forget. I can still remember the Olsen building’s critical dimensions in the same way that I can remember the number they gave me when I was in the airforce. And I can still remember the critical structural dimensions in feet and inches for the Reliance factory.
The Olsen amenities block did two startling things. The first was to ignore the class-ridden nature of the standard British workplace of 1969. The most militant and difficult workforce in London was being swept into a world that would be as unfamiliar for Millwall’s dockers, and as transformational for them, Foster hoped, as his own experience of arriving at Yale from Levenshulme. The Olsen restaurant, with its green fibreglass Charles Eames-designed chairs, its mint green carpet and its purple-painted steel staircase, looked more like a California beach house than a works canteen in the heart of one of the toughest working-class districts in Britain. It seemed a better fit for Mediterranean cuisine than bacon sandwiches. There was art from Fred Olsen’s personal collection hanging on the office walls, table tennis and snooker, a television lounge and twenty-four-hour opening for the café. If espresso for the masses had been invented yet, Olsen would certainly have offered it. Like his student project at Manchester, in which he had proposed combining a boathouse and a cottage in the same building, Foster’s idea for Olsen was to put everybody, management and dockers, in the same building. He insisted that they should share it with a sense of evangelistic conviction that came in part from his own experiences in the factories and warehouses of Manchester with their works entrances and their outside lavatories. At first, the idea was greeted with suspicion both by the union and by management. ‘Mike Thompson told me that you simply could not put dockers and managers together in the same building. The site management claimed that the dockers were dirty, that they used bad language, and that it would never work.’
Foster had to go to Fred Olsen himself to get his way. Olsen’s personal support allowed Foster to take on a quasi-management role, dealing directly with the dockers on the building, on behalf of the company. After the project was finished, Foster went back to Millwall and saw the docker’s shop steward. He shook Foster’s hand and asked him what he thought of the building now. Foster said, ‘It looks good, but I am a bit disturbed about all the temporary caravans on the forecourt selling hot dogs. What has gone wrong, don’t you like the canteen?’
The shop steward answered, ‘You don’t understand, that’s not for us, it’s for the truck drivers who don’t work for Olsen. We couldn’t possibly let them into our building.’
Fred Olsen was taken enough with what Foster had done to ask him to build a passenger terminal next to the amenities block, and to design his travel agency in Regent Street. He went on to work on a plan for Olsen’s Vestby headquarters building in Norway, and on an even more ambitious master plan for Gomera, a resort island in the Canaries.
The ideas on which the Gomera scheme was based were astonishingly advanced for the time. Asked to design an airport, and a road around the entire island, Foster suggested instead that the way to stop the place from turning into another Benidorm was to provide a ferry service from the main island rather than rely on an airport to fly in visitors. He envisaged a set of dead-end feeder roads, rather than despoiling the coastline with a ring road and a runway. There was provision for solar energy and wind power, and grey water recycling. None of it happened, at least under Foster’s direction, and most of the design work was done without Olsen paying much in the way of fees, just enough for it to be worthwhile opening an office in Norway. For Foster, the idea of having larger and more ambitious jobs to work on was important. He and Birkin Haward, one of the most gifted draughtsmen to work with Foster in the early days, drew and drew, in the hope that their seductive images would persuade Olsen to invest in them.
From the point of view of the architectural world, even more remarkable than the exercise in social engineering that Olsen represented was the fact that it was the first building in Britain to be wrapped in a glass skin with no visible means of support. Foster set out to create a building that went to extremes in the elegant refinement of its simplicity. By making the metal structure of the wall entirely invisible – the only trace on the outside of what held the glass in place was the black neoprene strip at the level of the first floor – Foster created something that looked quite different from anything that had been done before. The assembly drawings got on to the cover of Japanese magazines.
The Olsen building filled the gap between warehouses on either side, and its roof was designed to span all the way between them, without any supporting columns getting in the way. The difficult thing about that was how to allow for the roof to flex up and down if there was nothing propping it. Simply hanging rigid sheets of glass off a steel structure was not an option, given that it was inevitably going to bend. Foster’s solution was to support the glass wall by sitting it on the ground, and to put slots in the window mullions that left space for the roof to move without doing any damage to the glass. The impact of wind on the glass was dealt with by using the first floor inside the skin to brace it.
Glass, forty years later, has become the universal architectural skin for almost every new office building in London. For better or worse, they are all Olsen’s children, even if they lack its aesthetic and technical sophistication.
In 1969, however, glass on this scale was unheard of. Olsen’s schedule meant that the builders had just a year to finish the project, and there wasn’t anybody in Europe who was prepared to make the glass to the sizes Foster wanted in time. At 4.25 x 1.8 metres wide, the panes were huge. And they would need a sophisticated set of specially made fixing components to create the substructure needed to keep it safely in place. When he first suggested it, the contractors hired to build the structure and every specialist subcontractor in Britain said flatly that it couldn’t be done. But Foster wasn’t going to allow this to stop him from getting his way. He immediately set out to prove everyone wrong.
He knew of a manufacturer in America who had recently devised an off-the-peg curtain wall system that could do the job, and had the capacity to make the size of sheets of glass that he was after. ‘Nobody in Britain could make a glass wall. There is the Pittco T wall system, yes, but that is from America. Britain is different. So I set out to slaughter that particular sacred cow, the one that says that we couldn’t do what they could do in America, even if it meant importing it.’
But there was very little time. If the glass was going to reach Millwall and get fitted to the steel structure at the right moment, he had to get started immediately. Without stopping to think about whether his client was going to pay his expenses, he flew to Pittsburgh, home of the Pittsburgh Patent Glazing Corporation, to see what they had to offer.
Foster recalls arriving in Pittsburgh to find the company’s representative waiting for him at the airport. ‘The president is very keen to see you,’ he said. Foster replied, ‘This isn’t a social visit. I have forty-eight hours to do the shop drawings, I have to go back to Britain with them.’ The response was that this would not be possible: ‘It’s nothing to do with us here. You need to be in Kokomo, Indiana.’
Foster turned back into the airport and caught the next flight to Indiana. The company put on two extra shifts to work around the clock with him, and he left with a complete set of shop drawings, delineating everything needed to give the Olsen building its suave skin.
When he got back, Foster found the contractor, assuming that he would fail to deliver in time, had allowed for a six-week delay. So Foster succeeded in getting the glass to London, but the components sat in a shed while the builders caught up with the programme.
For Foster, one important lesson that he learned from Olsen, and also his experiences with the Willis Faber Building, was that it was possible to design special components rather than relying on what was already on the market.
If you have enough curiosity in the production process, you soon discover that you can design your own curtain wall, or your own ceiling, and have it made in the same time as ordering an existing design from a catalogue. The chances are that you will end up with a better product, and the cost will probably not be that different. If you come up with a good design, the likelihood is that your product will appear in someone else’s catalogue for another architect to specify in a different context. So if you go to Jim Stirling’s Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart, you will find the same studded rubber flooring that we developed for Willis Faber. Or go to shopping malls the world over and you will find escalators where you can see the insides moving. They did not exist before we did Willis Faber, but now they have become part of a universal building vocabulary.
Given the money that he spent on his flights, and on hiring Tim Street Porter, the most glamorous architectural photographer in London at the time, to record the working lives of the dockers before building started, it is hard to believe that Foster made anything out of Olsen financially. But Foster has always invested enthusiastically in doing things with a certain style.
There were underlying differences between the Foster way of working and the conventional approach to architectural practice. He had begun to understand that the best approach to take when tendering for a job was to ask lots of questions before offering any answers of his own. ‘In presentations, our competitors would talk about how their building would look. We just asked questions, and listened. Then we would go away, and we would come back, and ask some more questions. We made sure we understood both the functional and the social aspects of what they wanted.’
He really did believe in opening up the design process beyond architects. He would get Tony Hunt, the engineer, John Walker, a cost consultant, and Loren Butt, a services engineer, sitting around a table, and say, ‘Right, how are we going to design this building?’
At the beginning he had a close association with Martin Francis, who had trained at the Central School of Art and Design as a furniture designer, and who ended up designing yachts. Later, David Nelson joined the team. He had come from Hornsey art school and through the Royal College of Art, and had never taken a conventional architectural qualification either.
Foster was very suspicious of professional hierarchies, which, as he saw it, got in the way of getting the best out of a project.
You are expected to design a building in isolation from any of the other professions and then you hand it over for them to make it stand up. In Manchester, as a student, if you were taught structures at all, there was no connection to the way that you might actually design a building. The assumption was that somebody backstage would take on the design, and find a way do it.
Foster’s strategy had first taken shape in his mind while he was still at Yale, working on a student project for Paul Rudolph that was to become, in embryonic form, the basis for the Hong Kong bank. His idea for a tower building that turned a corner, evolved in a series of conversations with a creative engineer. ‘I remember saying to Rudolph that to have an engineer understand what as an architect I might feel, somebody who would help shape that building, was vital. He recommended somebody to work with, and that gave the design a very different spirit from the more conventional way of doing things.’
Foster built Foster Associates to replicate that experience. Not many conventional architects’ offices at that time would have hired Loren Butt, an environmental engineer who was working for a services contractor when Foster met him, so that he could become involved with the design of buildings from the outset, rather than being called in after the fact to come up with fixes for any flaws.
As Foster puts it, these were engineers who had always been trained to respond to architects by asking them what they wanted, and then coming up with somewhere to put the plumbing, and then provide an estimate of what it would cost. With Foster it wasn’t a question of where to put the pipes – the Pavlovian response, as he put it. Instead, it was getting to an understanding of the fundamental idea of how you might make a building feel comfortable to be in, whether that involved pipes or not. That allowed for leapfrogging problems, rather than being more or less ingenious about dealing with what might actually turn out to be the right answer to the wrong question. Once, when Fred Olsen was asked to give a reference for Foster, he said of him, ‘He will ask the right questions.’
There were other aspects of the Foster Associates’ approach that would become more apparent as time went on. Foster has a way of treating architecture as if it were a form of industrial design, prototyping components, attempting to achieve the economies of scale that come from mass production, rather than relying on an intuitive on-site building process.
Architecture leaves precious little time for anything else. Norman Foster has filled his life beyond it with flying, and a punishing combination of marathon running, long-distance cycling and cross-country skiing.
In the early days of his practice with Wendy, Foster barely saw people out of the office. The two of them would go home to Hampstead, where she would cook with care and imagination, and over the meal they would analyse the working day, think about their next steps, and plan how to deal with their employees and their clients. Wendy Foster had the worldliness to help him direct his energies in the most effective way.
By 1970, Norman Foster was financially successful enough to be able to rediscover the idea of flying that had first surfaced in his mind in childhood. One summer weekend, on a family outing to Dunstable Downs, he looked up and saw a succession of gliders manoeuvring in the sky. ‘I thought that they were the most beautiful objects I had ever seen, more beautiful than a Brancusi,’ he remembers. If this apotheosis had happened earlier, he might never have become an architect. ‘I would certainly have been a professional pilot, civil or military,’ he says. It also introduced him to a world of flying and flyers that was very different in its language and its preoccupations from that of the architects he knew.
Foster was interested enough in what he saw to walk down the hill from his picnic into the London Gliding Club, where he was offered a demonstration flight in a two-man glider. He was hooked at once. He quickly bought himself a new high-performance German-made fibreglass sail plane, the Libelle, the first aircraft to be made entirely from plastic. Not content with drifting on the thermals above the countryside, Foster threw himself into competitive gliding. He bought a succession of racing gliders: a Finnish PIK, and then a string of ASWs, also from Germany. Weekend after weekend, Foster towed his craft up to Dunstable behind his Range Rover, covering up to 250 kilometres in the air in a session. He started to seek out places that he could achieve greater and greater distances. He went to Texas for one marathon, and Pennsylvania for another.
It was a sport that developed Foster’s peripheral vision, a skill needed for him to be able simultaneously to look ahead and also to keep track of the horizon line in relation to his wing tips.
But the adrenaline rush of racing gliders was not enough to keep him interested for long. Foster quickly moved on to powered flight. Within two years he had learned to fly both competitive aerobatics in a French CAP 10 and helicopters, and finally commercial jets. Each of them became, for a while, obsessive interests. It is an unusual progression; most enthusiasts stick to just one or two forms of flight. Foster mastered all of them – going as far as taking the controls in a Hawk military jet trainer and flying a Spitfire himself. ‘They are totally different cultures, even if they are all apparently about the same thing. I put down a helicopter next to a glider at a meet once, and somebody made a disparaging remark. I silenced them when I turned and explained that I knew all about the effects of downwash on gliders.’
For years, flying filled all Foster’s life outside architecture. He has accumulated 109 log books charting every hour spent flying every type. While so many architects are only truly comfortable with other architects, Foster is not one of them. He finds it easier to spend time with people who fly planes, or, like him, push themselves on skis or bicycles to extreme limits.
Indeed, Foster’s present wife Elena, whom he met in 1994, realised that the only way that she could fully share his life was to overcome her fear of flight, to earn a pilot’s licence of her own, and, like her husband, become a cross-country skier.
Foster had expected that his father would be the first of his parents to die, as he had always suffered poor health. He remembered the shock of seeing, as a nine-year-old child, his father brought home from work one night, dangerously ill, and rushed to hospital with a perforated ulcer. But despite this and other serious illnesses, Robert Foster outlived his wife.
Lilly died suddenly, after having a heart attack in her doctor’s surgery. On the day that it happened, Foster was out of his office, travelling back from a site visit to the Willis Faber Building. Michael Hopkins, his partner at the time, took the call from Foster’s father, and had to tell him the bad news. Five years later, in 1976, his father was dead too, of lung cancer. Neither of his parents ever saw any of their son’s buildings completed, although they had been to visit their grandchildren in Hampstead where Foster was living by the time that they were born. Foster’s eldest son, Ti, remembers visiting his grandparents in Levenshulme, and seeing his father’s bedroom kept exactly as it had been when he lived there; his rucksack on the bed, his drawing table by the window.
The death of his mother left a deep mark. In 1991, when both his parents had been dead for almost twenty years, Foster had a sharp urge to find out more about his mother while there were still people left alive who had known her and might be able to tell him about the circumstances of her birth. He met his cousin Lionel Beckett, at that time working for IBM, and took him to lunch at Terence Conran’s Chelsea restaurant, Bibendum. He explained that there were big gaps in what he knew about his mother’s life, and that the only link that he had left with her was through Beckett’s father, Sid.
Lionel Beckett told Foster that his father had moved to Australia after his wife died and was now being looked after in a nursing home in Melbourne. Beckett went on to say that he thought it was very possible that his grandfather, who had been a supervisor in a cotton mill and had a well-developed sense of moral purpose, had indeed taken Lilly in as an adopted daughter.
Foster realised that if he was ever going to find out more about his mother’s past, he could not wait any longer. He was too impatient to delay going to Australia, even by the day that he would have needed to wait to get a direct flight to Melbourne. He set off at once, changing planes and spending the night in Sydney, from where he called the matron at the nursing home in which his uncle was living. ‘She told me that he was looking forward to seeing me. When I got there the following day, it was recognisably Sid, but there was no communication with him. It was a one-way conversation. He was smiling gently, but said nothing.’
‘Don’t worry,’ the matron told Foster. ‘I’ve seen him like this before. If you come back tomorrow, I am sure that he will be able to speak to you.’ Foster went back to his hotel. But the next morning he got a phone call, to tell him that his uncle had died in his sleep during the night. ‘I felt totally empty. I put on my running shoes, and took a run in the park. What do I do now? Life treated my parents harshly. I felt that I never had the kind of conversations with them that I would have wanted. There were so many things left unsaid.’
Both Olsen and Reliance Controls have now been destroyed. In the mildly humiliating case of Reliance, not before the metal skin had been mutilated by cutting it open to insert a timber-framed window bought off the shelf from a local builder’s merchant – an indignity that Foster interprets as spite: the cladding had been designed to accommodate larger window openings as required.
Almost unnoticed, the Olsen building was demolished in 1987. It is a measure of Foster’s lack of sentimentality that he made no comment in public at the time it was torn down. The last upstream dock in London had closed eight years earlier, and there was no shipping to disturb the mirror-smooth water lapping at the Olsen wharf. For a while the building had been the home of the London Dockland Development Corporation, the organisation charged with rescuing the area from dereliction. Then, after some false starts, the neighbouring Canary Wharf erupted with the skyscrapers that turned it into an instant financial behemoth, a massive development that sank the Olsen building in its wake.
Every physical trace of Olsen has vanished, just like the ships and the dockers who once worked there. It lives on only as a hyper-realist painting made by the artist Ben Johnson. In his painstaking depiction of its smoked glass façade, you see the ghostly reflection of the long-gone shipping that once tied up on the wharf in front of the building.
Foster has returned to work in the area again and again. The Jubilee line station at Canary Wharf, with its blistered oval disc glass roof, is the best of his underground stations. Close by is his second tower for HSBC. Across the river is the bus station that he built for what used to be called the Millennium Dome.
Willis Faber was to fare better than Olsen. In 1991 it became the youngest building in Britain to be awarded the protection of a Grade One listing, a rare distinction and a safeguard for works of architectural or historic importance, normally reserved for medieval cathedrals and baroque palaces. To stop the owner’s plans to destroy the swimming pool on the ground floor to make more room for offices, English Heritage rushed it through the listing process. After listing, which prohibits any changes without official consent, was confirmed, Willis Corroon, as the firm had renamed itself by this time, withdrew the plan. The pool survives, and even though it has been drained and boarded over, it could yet be put back into use should any future occupier decide that they wanted to. Foster is as phlegmatic about this as he was about the destruction of the Olsen building. ‘There are other public swimming pools in Ipswich now.’ He had nothing to do with the decision to list the building, taking no part in the lobbying for or against.
Willis Faber is a more complex version of the same kind of thinking that shaped Olsen. Both were intended as civilised and egalitarian workplaces. But Foster was able to push his ideas much further with the Willis Faber project. The Olsen building was marooned behind high dock walls, so Foster had no way to develop a relationship with the city outside. Willis Faber’s black glass skin reflects the delicate texture of the medieval streetscape of Ipswich. It fits in by not fitting in. Responding to an irregular island site, the outline of the building is a continuous perimeter made up of a series of voluptuous curves. A void at the centre of the building looks up towards a grass-covered roof, and allows space for a bank of escalators to move workers through the building and up to the canteen, accommodated in a glass box whose rectilinear form makes a tense contrast to the curved iceberg on which it rests. The rest of the roof is turfed, providing an expansive garden in which to enjoy a picnic lunch, and a very effective form of insulation. Along with the swimming pool on the ground floor and the roof garden, Willis Faber had amenities far beyond what was on offer to the dockers.
In its form and plan, Olsen is a strictly rational project. Willis Faber hints at another kind of thinking. It is a building that takes pleasure in the glossy sweeping curves of its skin, that make it look like a huge black glass grand piano. It is both an abstraction and, because of the way its reflective surfaces mirror its surroundings, an evocation of the traditional architecture all around it. On another level, it triggers memories of the Daily Express Building in the Manchester of Foster’s youth, as well as of the visionary proposal for a black glass skyscraper in Berlin that Mies van der Rohe speculated about in 1919 in a series of heavy charcoal sketches and montages.
There is another architectural layer at Willis, too. Beyond the glossy black exterior is an explosion of vivid colour: acid green and searing yellow. And it could have gone even further in its sensuality. In the form that they have been built, Willis Faber’s curves are two-dimensional, but Foster had already begun to explore the idea of a building with three-dimensional curves designed with Buckminster Fuller, the American disciple of the geodesic dome who was to have a profound influence on Foster. They called the project the Climatroffice. Taking the Willis Faber brief as a point of departure, the two men looked at how the contemporary workplace might become sunlit and naturally ventilated. They were also starting to think about a new kind of architectural geometry. There are sketches that show how Foster was proposing to abolish orthogonal geometry altogether. ‘Willis Faber might have looked like a blancmange, a forerunner of the blob-like buildings of the first decade of the twenty-first century,’ he says. In the event, there was too much uncertainty about the precise shape of the site that Willis Faber would be able to assemble for the building, with some neighbouring landowners refusing to sell, and the idea did not go much beyond a series of sketches that suggested but did not spell out exactly how the project would have fitted into the Ipswich street-line.
Willis Faber was also the first project that Helmut Jacoby was recruited to illustrate for Foster. In the 1950s Jacoby had made perspectives of remarkable precision and power for Marcel Breuer, Philip Johnson, Eero Saarinen and I.M. Pei. They were extraordinarily intense images that became almost as well known in the architectural world as the finished buildings they represented. A Jacoby rendering became a kind of endorsement, demonstrating that its subject belonged in the architectural big league. But the emotional effort involved left Jacoby exhausted. He gave up his career as a perspective artist, and returned to the provincial obscurity of architectural practice in Germany.
Foster tracked him down and persuaded him to come out of retirement to make two key drawings of Willis Faber for him. And he followed this up with a string of other projects, most of them never realised, such as his VW distribution centre in Milton Keynes. He was setting the tone for his future, spending freely, to give the aura of authority to a growing practice. It was another sign of Foster’s unwavering determination, as well as his readiness to measure himself against the architectural masters.
Working with Jacoby also involved a deft bit of tactical planning:
I asked Jacoby to make one drawing of Willis Faber, to show it as I wanted it to be, and another version that was one storey higher. He finished both of them, but I took just the taller of the two versions of the building to show the planning officer in Ipswich. He was worried about the height.
‘Couldn’t you take one floor off?’ he asked me.
‘Well, I don’t know, I could think about it, but you will have to give me three weeks to come back to you.’
The strategy worked, and Foster, delighted by Jacoby’s vizualisations of his buildings, worked with him right up until the competition drawings for the Reichstag in Berlin in 1992.
In 1974, Robert Sainsbury, who had steered his family grocery business to prosperity as a national supermarket chain, was looking for an architect to build a gallery that would house the art he had amassed over forty years. It was an eclectic and wide-ranging collection, encompassing Degas, ethnographic material from Oceania, Inuit carvings and Bauhaus drawings. The first piece that Sainsbury had bought in the 1930s was by Jacob Epstein. He later acquired the monumental Henry Moore bronze that sits outside the gallery (it was Sainsbury who introduced Foster to Moore, a meeting which Foster put to good use by beginning to understand the ways, so different from an architect, that an artist sees form). Sainsbury got to know Francis Bacon, commissioning a portrait from him in 1957. He bought his work, he kept the letters Bacon wrote to him, and he supported him financially and emotionally. For her part, Lisa Sainsbury collected pottery by Lucie Rie, with whom she had a long friendship, as well as work by Hans Cooper.
Journalist Corin Hughes Stanton, whose mother had encouraged Sainsbury to start the collection, took him to see a range of buildings designed by architects who seemed promising. Hughes Stanton, at that time working at the Design Council, would have been aware of Foster’s growing reputation. Foster had recently guest-edited an issue of the Architectural Review on factory buildings; instead of being illustrated by the conventional carefully composed architectural photographs, it featured grainy 35mm black-and-white images that tried to convey the immediacy of the contemporary city.
Sainsbury was hugely taken by the Olsen building. He summoned Foster to appear at 10 a.m. on New Year’s Day at his Smith Square house. ‘Bob wanted to talk to me about what I had done before, and what I was thinking about for their project. The conversation went on and on. He disappeared at one point, then came back to ask me to stay for lunch, and continue the conversation. I called home to say that I would be late.’ Foster got to see Sainsbury’s study, exquisitely designed by the young Dutch Indonesian Kho Liang Ie, studded with tiny Inuit carvings. And he saw the portrait of Lisa Sainsbury by Francis Bacon hanging over the mantelpiece, one of three survivors from the series of eight that he painted of her. Dissatisfied with the results, Bacon had destroyed the rest.
It was the start of a relationship with Robert and Lisa Sainsbury that became increasingly close as the project took shape. At the beginning, though, Foster still remembers the burning flush of embarrassment after their first formal meeting to discuss the project. Unsure how to address the Sainsburys, he had discreetly asked Kho Liang Ie, who was to collaborate on the gallery interior, and received the answer: ‘Bob and Lisa, of course.’ Foster did as Ie suggested, and says that he realised only afterwards how horribly over-familiar he must have sounded.
What began as a working relationship began to develop into a strong personal bond after the death of Foster’s parents. In 1988, when Wendy developed the cancer that would kill her in less than a year, it was the Sainsburys to whom the distraught Foster looked for emotional support. The Fosters had not long returned from a trip to America to adopt their third child, Jay, when the diagnosis came through. Wendy was determined to have nothing to do with conventional medicine but to rely instead on a macrobiotic diet and meditation. She had never been convinced of the omnipotence of doctors or by mainstream medicine, and their first two children were both born at home. She had at one point even persuaded Foster to try a macrobiotic diet in an attempt to deal with a painful arm. For Foster, macrobiotics were not a success; within a month he had lost so much weight that his watch was hanging loose from his wrist. He abandoned the experiment after being taken aside by a doctor and told that his diet was threatening to do lasting damage to his health. In the end it was Lisa Sainsbury who helped to find the nurses to care for Wendy.
Robert and Lisa Sainsbury had offered their collection to the University of East Anglia in 1973. One of their daughters had studied there, and in Sainsbury’s eyes it had the particular merit of not being Oxbridge – he saw no reason to become a benefactor to the already well-provided-for older universities.
Sainsbury had a strong sense of social responsibility. A committed supporter of the Welfare State, he took the working conditions of his employees seriously. He also wanted to do something about the two-nations divide between the arts and the sciences identified by C.P. Snow. He was ready for a radical new approach to making a building to house art, and in Foster he found it.
The UEA campus had been created by Denys Lasdun in the five years after the university was established in 1963. Those were days in which the new universities looked like the precursors of a social revolution, smuggled into gentle rural landscapes on the outskirts of a string of historic towns. Their campuses were conceived as self-contained worlds that demonstrated new ways to live and work, reflected in an architecture that was more adventurous than would be possible on the outside. Lasdun designed a remarkably powerful, even ruthless scheme that created a continuous wall of concrete structures, like a set of linked stepped pyramids, perhaps the most ambitious attempt at that feverish, half-dystopian, biggest-of-the-big architectural idea of the 1960s – building a megastructure in Britain. Tradition had been abolished. The University of East Anglia wall, backed by an elevated walkway, contains student residences, as well as laboratories, teaching spaces, and classrooms. It has the massive presence of an aircraft carrier beached in a wheat field.
As an expression of a single, ruthless architectural will, it would have attracted attention anywhere. On the edge of the medieval cathedral city of Norwich, the impact was overwhelming. When the new universities got under way, a campus architect could still expect to be listened to with respect, and even indulged, despite the often incendiary nature of their ideas. But by the time that Foster arrived in Norwich, Lasdun’s role had been reduced to that of the powerless custodian of his master plan. Some found his concrete too brutal, and the university estates department, who did not share his vision for the campus, had fallen out with him. Foster remembers the estates officer Gordon Marshall telling him the unhappy story of a battle nobody won. Lasdun lost the job, and Marshall suffered a heart attack. Even though Foster’s work was from a very different tradition to Lasdun’s, he was careful to go to see him to discuss the project before declaring his hand. Foster was planning not only to break with the concrete uniform worn by the rest of the campus, but also to site the building in a such a way that it could be interpreted as turning its back on Lasdun and the architectural ethos of the university. To avoid that impression, he wanted Lasdun’s endorsement.
Foster conceived of the Sainsbury Centre as a gleaming silver tube, turning away from the campus to look out over the green landscape, and a lake. Foster’s building seems barely to touch the ground; it is tethered to Lasdun’s concrete megastructure by the most tenuous of umbilical cords, a high-level glass walkway. It penetrates the tube at an oblique angle, and then descends into the gallery by way of a sculptural spiral staircase with no visible means of support. It was typical of Foster’s approach at the time. He abolished design problems – the joint between two materials, for example, or how to make a formal approach to a building – by avoiding them altogether. He made sure that two different materials never meet, and that there is always a neat gap clearly between them. There were no formal approaches to Foster’s early buildings. If the Sainsbury Centre had followed the logic of its temple-like form, there would have been a grand entrance, reached by steps, into an opening in the centre of the glazed façade looking over the landscape. But formality was something that Foster found hard to take at this stage of his career. He introduces you to the Sainsbury Centre in as casual and oblique a manner as he could think of: through a door that makes no ceremony, and makes its entrance from the side at an angle, rather than head-on. It is architecture apparently without capital letters. And yet, it is a building of discipline and order. While Foster was researching architectural approaches to housing art, he went to look at Mies van der Rohe’s Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. Mies’ building really is a classical temple, with a colonnade that echoes Schinkel’s Altes Museum, but it also offers a single soaring space for temporary exhibitions, and an underground gallery that reflects something of the spatial approach adopted by Foster.
Originally, Foster was to have been responsible for the shell of the gallery only. At the time of that first New Year’s Day meeting it was envisaged that the interior would be left to Kho Liang Ie, who had excited the Sainsburys with the idea of displaying their collection on moveable screens rather than conventional gallery walls. In the event, Ie died before the project could get under way.
The nature of the project shifted in other ways, too. When Foster and the Sainsburys started talking, there had been an assumption that the building would get a conspicuous site next to the other arts faculty buildings on the campus, close to the main entrance of the university. It would serve as a marker, announcing the university to the world outside through its most public building.
To Foster, preconceptions of any kind are always anathema. His whole career has been based on trying to answer questions in a way that had not previously occurred to his clients. He told one company that asked him to design a temporary new building for them that a better solution would be to reorganise themselves in their existing premises and not build anything at all.
The Sainsburys and the university had assumed that their building should be at the other end of the campus from where it eventually landed. I suggested that we should have no preconceptions. They thought they had identified the site. I suggested that we should look at how many other possible sites could also be identified and evaluate them on a comparative basis.
We looked at the entrance to the campus. I suggested a more remote site, next to the science faculty, and away from the other arts buildings. In this position it would have more of a landscape dimension and would have allowed room for expansion in the future.
Putting his gallery next to the university’s biological sciences laboratories appealed to Robert Sainsbury, who did not come from an arts background. ‘If I had spent my time at university studying next to an art museum, I might have approached life very differently,’ Sainsbury told Foster.
The other preconception was that the project would be made up of three distinct buildings: a faculty club, the school of fine art itself, and the Sainsbury collection. The open question was whether there should be a fourth, additional building, for temporary exhibitions. It was another of the multiple preconceptions that Foster successfully challenged; he put everything in a single building, although in retrospect concedes that he might have approached the entrance differently.
Foster’s idea was to reduce the building to a simple but ineffably elegant tube, open to the landscape at both ends, thus allowing sunlight to filter in where and when needed. A single building would also, of course, be bigger, more impressive and more photogenic than four smaller ones.
The possibility that there might be an alternative to the polarity between one building, or four, did not occur to Foster. He saw buildings as single statements. A more traditional understanding of architecture might have been to develop a plan with greater complexity and intricacy, one that could, albeit with less clarity, put each separate function into a single building.
Foster’s relationship with the Sainsburys was an essential part of the design process.
The Sainsburys joked with me that I disrupted their family life. They said they had sleepless nights after discussions of the design budgets. I had a formula for coming to a recommendation by giving them a menu of four options. With each option, I gave them a presentation on its strengths and weaknesses, and then from the beauty parade explained which proposal I recommended. Mostly that worked well, but Lisa once said, ‘Norman, don’t take me through the whole presentation, just tell me what you want to do.’
They trusted him enough to allow him not only to do things that they were doubtful would work, but also to try things that they were sure would not. It was only when the centre actually opened in 1978 that Robert Sainsbury finally understood that Foster’s idea of separating the gallery from the public seating area with nothing more substantial than a chest-high glass screen could make a beautiful, and usable, space for art. Foster, however, did not have everything his own way. In one version of the design he wanted to make the main space a huge conservatory filled with full-grown ficus trees which would have put the restaurant and the gallery next to each other. ‘Lisa said, “There is no discussion, and no debate. Tear it up.” She was right, the reality of a restaurant is noise, clatter and smell.’
Foster had already tackled the problem of an all-glass curtain wall at Olsen. The Sainsbury Centre had curtain walls too, albeit on a scale that, by comparison with Olsen’s two floors, is heroic. It also demanded something even more testing of the architect’s technical skills: an aluminium skin that wrapped roof and walls in a single continuous movement. He had in mind a skin that climbed up one wall of the building, spilled out over the roof, and then went down the other side.
It was a challenge that nobody had dealt with before. Foster and Tony Pritchard devised a kit of ribbed aluminium-faced tiles formed in a vacuum with enough variations to cope with every part of the building. There were flat and curved options. Some were glazed, others were designed for use on the edges of the building. There were panels with extract and intake ducts, clear glass panels, and blank panels, panels with opening doors, and others with windows.
Jan Kaplicky, a visionary Czech architect working in Foster’s office at the time, later produced a brilliantly delineated drawing that captured every element of a system that was both a catalogue of parts and an expression of the essence of what Foster was trying to achieve.
The Sainsbury Centre set a mark for the way that Foster would do things in future. It was the first time that he made extensive use of careful modelling to design out surprises. He had full-size furnished mock-ups made up in a garage in London to show the academics what their rooms would be like. Foster’s inevitable willingness to change his mind about a design at the last possible moment was also evident. He had originally planned to make the centre with a simple portal frame. The engineering drawings were all but finished, the orders were almost ready to be placed for the structural steel. And then suddenly Foster understood that if he left the design as it was, it would, in his terms at least, be a failure. Instead of the overwhelming clarity that he had in mind, the interior would become a clutter of little boxes scattered across the floor. In an instant he saw how it could be done. The lavatories, the kitchens, the stores and the services had to be pushed into the sides, stacked up in two tiers. All the mechanical plant and ducts that are conventionally hidden in the ceiling were moved out and positioned either in the walls or in a basement undercroft, allowing the roof void to become an open mesh filtering sunlight down into the main space, an idea that later shaped the planning of Stansted Airport.
For the Sainsbury Centre, he needed a thick wall, wide enough to take everything that got in the way of the Olympian splendour of the main space. The outer face would be the external weather-proof wall; the inner one would hide an eight-foot-wide zone running from end to end of the centre. But to do that meant a total redesign of the structure and services, discarding almost everything that the engineers had worked on over the previous months. It would cost time, and it would eat into the fees from which Foster and the other consultants made their living.
Tony Hunt was shocked when Foster explained his change of mind. ‘You can’t do this, Norman!’ he said. ‘It’s a fantastic idea, but it’s your next project. This time it’s just too late.’ Hunt had already sized every single piece of steel in the structure and did not relish starting again. Foster remembers sitting at the circular white conference table in the practice’s office in Fitzroy Street, saying, ‘There may not be a next time.’
Foster persuaded Hunt, and all the other engineers, to start again. There was, of course, no reason for the Sainsburys to pay for their architect to change his mind. Foster absorbed the cost of the extra design work, as did all the engineers, who could see that Foster was an architect with a future, and one who could soon be the source of a lot more high-profile work. And it was this move that turned the Sainsbury Centre from an impressive building into a great piece of architecture.
There were problems with budget. The costs of building the basement, introduced as a late addition, had been underestimated. And the swooping staircase, elegantly spiralling down into the gallery from the high-level route linked to the university’s walkway, looked as graceful as a dancer but had a disconcerting wobble. Fixing it was expensive, and required steel flanges to be welded into place to stiffen it. Foster got the blame even though he hadn’t designed it. As far as the Sainsburys were concerned, he was responsible for everything, including the engineering issues.
The mundane realities of the life-support systems of academic existence were banished into the eight-foot-wide wall. It was like a giant version of an aircraft hull, where the smooth metal skin on the outside and the moulded plastic cabin wall on the inside give no clue that there is a gap between them that is packed full of hydraulics, cables and structural spars.
This wasn’t the only thing that Foster did at the Sainsbury Centre in the pursuit of visual purity. The academic offices form a glass-fronted strip near the centre of the building, protecting gallery space at one end from the café at the other. So controlling was Foster that he insisted nothing must be allowed to disturb the restrained simplicity of the interior. To this end, even the door locks in the glass walls of the offices are buried in the floor to make them invisible. ‘I did not want to spoil the door details. I would be more pragmatic now, but getting the academics to scrabble on the floor with their keys seemed a small price to pay for such elegant details,’ Foster says with a certain guilty pleasure. But Foster’s initial idea of giving the lecturers roofless studies was vetoed by the university. Even so, there was much grumbling about inadequate sound-proofing that took months to be resolved.
As work started on site, the project became increasingly fractious. Robert Sainsbury took getting his own way for granted. He had never encountered the power that an estates officer has on a university campus. For Sainsbury, who was putting up more than half the cash, the Sainsbury Centre was ‘his’ building. Frank Thistlethwaite, the founding Vice Chancellor, was equally determined that this building was going to be the landmark that crowned his career. And Gordon Marshall, the estates officer, was not going to compromise. Foster put himself in the middle of all this campus strife, and developed completely separate relationships with all factions. ‘If I hadn’t, the project could have been sabotaged,’ remembers Foster. ‘The Sainsburys never realised the power certain individuals had in the university. Marshall had already had an almighty bust-up with Denys Lasdun, who he got on with even worse than he did with the Sainsburys.’
These were not the only tensions threatening the project. The city of Norwich was beginning to grow suspicious of the university. What had once been a source of civic pride, and jobs, was now looked upon as an expanding, and possibly subversive, intrusion in its midst. The fallout from the events of May 1968 in Paris was still setting students and junior academics everywhere against their university administrations. And there was agitation from some of those students over what, with a careful blend of snobbery with Marxism-Leninism, they chose to interpret as the university selling its soul to capitalist grocers by allowing Robert Sainsbury to build what was described as looking like one of his supermarkets. It was a prejudice that Foster’s chosen means of transport to commute to Norwich would have done nothing to dispel.
Foster, having recently learned how to pilot a helicopter, was flying back and forth from London in an effort to smooth things over. Arriving in a helicopter was quite a gesture for a young architect. It was a sign that Foster was not entirely at home in the herbivorous and close-knit world of liberal Hampstead architects. The driving idea behind his work was egalitarian, the abolition of ‘us and them’ and ‘posh and scruffy’, as Foster always described his industrial buildings. But Foster was no socialist. He had made his own way out of Levenshulme by embracing the modern world, and he saw no reason why others could not do the same, without state intervention.
The Sainsbury Centre opened in 1978 at a particularly bleak moment for British architecture. In the aftermath of the collapse of Ronan Point, the demolition of scores of troublesome teenage tower blocks and the loss of faith in the ability of modernism to deliver its promises of utopia, the profession was in the grip of a kind of collective nervous breakdown. Against this background, the Sainsbury Centre was an unmistakable masterpiece. A masterpiece that had a public role beyond its ostensible purpose, because it could restore a sense of confidence in contemporary architects. It was understood as a success not just for Foster, but for architecture in general. While the idea of an extruded, tightly skinned metal tube with glass walls at each end is simplicity itself, Foster conceived it on a scale that gives it both drama and intimacy. The gallery, with its armchairs and tables piled up with books in the midst of the Sainsbury collection, has the kind of informal domesticity that you might expect to find in the library of a Palladian country house rather than a museum. But the towering height, and the uninterrupted view end to end, gives the interior a quality of genuine grandeur. The special character is heightened by the ceiling high above, the intricate web of bladed louvres screening a deep structure, and the array of lights that never quite define the ceiling plane but leave it shimmering and ambiguous. The precision of the metal-clad walls and the white perforated aluminium louvre blinds that descend at the end wall to screen the gallery from direct sunlight have exactly the kind of effortless beauty achieved by Foster’s glider. It is an effortlessness that is achieved only with the expenditure of sustained effort.
The Sainsbury Centre is often described as an aircraft hangar of a space. It is true that in it, Foster entirely avoided the idea of architecture as a matter of spatial organisation, with a sequence of rooms developed along routes. He abolished spatial hierarchy and, as he was to do later with the first HSBC headquarters and with the Reichstag, he turned a building into a mechanism that could control light, rather than accept a more passive role. But the Sainsbury Centre is no dumb shed. It has the precision of watchmaking or jewellery. It co-opts the landscape, inside and outside. Walking through it can feel as exhilarating as flying in sunlit cloud.
There is a photograph of the Sainsbury Centre, taken when it opened, that has become the most powerful single image of a work of British architecture of its time. It stands in the twilight, reflected in a lake in front of it, like a classical temple in an Arcadian landscape. At the same time, its structure has been reduced to almost nothing; it resembles an ethereal machine, a glistening spacecraft, barely tethered to the earth.
The response was overwhelming. Unlike Willis Faber, whose black glass walls concealed a private interior, the Sainsbury Centre was open to the public. And it offered them an undeniably moving experience. The vast scale and height of the structure provide a sense of dignified calm. This is a building that is clearly of the present, yet equally clearly offers the traditional qualities of architectural monuments. Nearly twenty years later, introducing Foster at the ceremony to present him with the Royal Gold Medal for Architecture, Robert Sainsbury declared that the Centre was itself the greatest work of art in his collection. Even Leon Krier, who was to become the most militant of architects looking to rediscover tradition, the man who planned Poundbury for the Prince of Wales, once admitted that the elegance of the Sainsbury Centre had moved him.
The Sainsbury Centre weighs 5,619 tons. Norman Foster knows that now, but on the day that Buckminster Fuller asked him the question, Foster had to go home and do some calculations.
I wrote a letter back to him. I made some very interesting discoveries because in the course of finding out how much the building weighed, I realised the disproportionate amount of weight that was located in the least attractive part of the building, which was the service basement. And of course the smallest amount of weight was in this great hall for displaying works of art and teaching.
Foster remembers the day that he flew Fuller to the university in his helicopter, setting it down on the lawn in front of the Sainsbury Centre:
We walked past a vitrine with a tiny Eskimo figure. He said, ‘Isn’t it interesting how good these tiny things look in this space.’ Then we walked through the cafeteria, out through the door into the greenery beyond. We spent forty minutes ambling around the building. Inside the special exhibition area, he picked up that the sun had moved. He noticed how the shadows were different from when we first arrived. You would not expect this high-tech guru to be sensitive to the way that the sun had moved.
What was not obvious after the triumphal opening was that the pristine beauty of the glorious sparkling aluminium skin was already doomed. It was not the aluminium itself that was the cause of the galloping sickness that threatened to destroy the entire building. The problem was at the points where the metal met the insulation layer concealed inside the skin. It started an unforeseen chemical reaction that aggressively attacked the metal. Foster calls it cancer, a striking choice of words. ‘Once it has set in, it has the potential to accelerate in an insidious way. Like the human form of cancer, things can look great from the outside, but inside, it has the power to consume the building,’
Signs of the metal being attacked by an aggressive form of rust were first detected in a maintenance room where it remained invisible to outsiders. The nature of the design allowed every panel to be unbolted, and their replacements could be fixed in position with no more trouble than replacing the tyres on a car. Before there was any public awareness of anything having gone wrong, the entire skin had been stripped away and deftly replaced with white steel panels that were not prone to the same problems. It could have been the cause of disastrously bad publicity, fatally questioning the competence of a young architectural practice. Instead David Sainsbury, Robert’s son, quietly funded all the repairs (later, David was to be a supporter of the Millennium Bridge) and Foster’s reputation for technical competence remained intact. Though the incident passed without a major legal or emotional upheaval, it was nevertheless a traumatic shock for Foster.
Of the key people in the early days of his career, the people that he most wanted to please, the people who have shaped his life and his work, it was Paul Rudolph who showed Foster how to draw and think like an architect while he was still a student. Richard Rogers, his first professional partner, was a man with whom he could talk about architecture endlessly, and with whom he felt inspired enough to start an architectural practice for the first time. Wendy Cheeseman gave him roots, the stability of a family, and the resources and insight that were needed to start their own practice. When the difficult but necessary break with Richard Rogers and Team Four came, it was Wendy who was first to grasp the inevitable. She didn’t want to wait for what had been a close friendship to sour. ‘Let’s do it now,’ she said. And she had an eloquence and foresight unusual in architects.
Fred Olsen was the client for the first major building Foster designed under his own name. Robert and Lisa Sainsbury were not only his two most loyal clients, giving him the chance to prove himself, they played a part in his personal life as something close to surrogate parents.
But it was Buckminster Fuller – the man who spontaneously let slip the phrase ‘spaceship earth’ in a speech in 1951, long before there were any spaceships – who gave him the ambition to speculate about what architecture might be, beyond the pragmatic. Born in 1895, Fuller is one of the more extraordinary maverick figures of the twentieth century. He trained neither as an architect, nor a designer, but studied classics at Harvard – until he was expelled. Part visionary inventor, part quixotic self-promoter, he was an ecologist, futurist, cartographer, car designer and not very successful poet. After leaving Harvard, he tried to make a success of various businesses, including a short-lived construction company.
Left bankrupt during the Great Depression, Fuller struggled to overcome a number of serious personal difficulties, including alcoholism, the death of a daughter through meningitis, and a suicidal depression, and in the 1940s began teaching at Black Mountain College, one of the birthplaces of the American avant garde. His position at the college gave him the opportunity to work with the sculptor and designer Isamu Noguchi, and it was during this time that he began to keep a series of notebooks recording his observations of a world which he believed was rapidly running out of resources. The resulting shortages, Fuller presciently believed, would lead to political instability and warfare.
His inventions were many and varied. He devised his own projection for mapping the globe. He designed what he called the Dymaxion House, one of the most intriguing of all twentieth-century experiments in trying to build prefabricated houses in a manner that would match the low cost, efficiency and speed of a car manufacturer’s production line. He designed the three-wheel Dymaxion Car, a streamlined tear-drop that could turn in its own length (Foster has since built a working replica, exact in every detail). Later, Fuller worked with the Beech Aircraft Company to manufacture the Wichita House, a circular prefabricated metal home designed to be made on production lines. The only surviving example, appropriately perhaps, is in the Henry Ford Museum in Detroit.
Fuller explored complex geometries to make large structures with minimal use of materials. Though he is perhaps best known for his work with the geodesic dome, Fuller was not in fact the original inventor of the geodesic idea. The concept had first been patented in Germany in the 1920s, and was used by the British aircraft designer Barnes Wallis, but Fuller managed put it to use on a larger and larger scale, realising a huge example for the US pavilion at the Montreal Expo in 1967. It eventually achieved far greater success than the Dymaxion house when the Pentagon started building domes of all sizes in substantial numbers to shelter radar arrays for its early-warning system to protect against Soviet missile launches.
Fuller believed in big ideas. He travelled from student congress to student congress, holding forth for hours on end in his curious, almost mechanical, monotone voice, with a vocabulary that relied on a range of words that he had invented for himself. Long before the idea became commonplace, Fuller dreamed of a sustainable planet, and speculated about putting Manhattan under a giant dome, two miles in diameter, to protect it from pollution.
In 1938, Fuller wrote: ‘Scientific design is linked to the stars far more directly than to the earth. Star-gazing? Admittedly. But it is essential to accentuate the real source of energy and change, in contrast to the emphasis that has always been placed on keeping man “down to earth”.’
Foster admired Fuller and wanted to work with him. He saw a kindred energy in the single-mindedness that kept Fuller circling the globe at eighty-seven. Fuller was damming about conventional notions of what constituted modern architecture. To him, architecture as it was practised in the 1960s was chiefly cosmetic:
The International Style brought to America by the Bauhaus innovators used standard plumbing fixtures and only ventured so far as to persuade manufacturers to modify the surface of the valve handles and spigots, and the colour, size and arrangements of the tiles. The International Bauhaus never went back of the wall surface to look at the plumbing … they never enquired into the overall problem of sanitary fittings themselves. In short they only looked at problems of modifications of the surface of end products, which end products were inherently sub functions of a technically obsolete world.
Foster soaked up much of Fuller’s millenarian spirit. And just as Fuller towards the end of his life found himself picketed by student radicals who took his embrace of unstoppable change as a form of corporate technophilia, so Foster has also found himself on the wrong side of the barricades from time to time.
Foster’s relationship with Fuller was part of a triangular conversation that had Reyner Banham as its third participant.
Nigel Whiteley’s critical biography of Reyner Banham describes Banham’s view of Fuller in terms that could also reflect his view of the early Foster:
The architectural profession started by mistaking him for a man preoccupied with creating structures to envelop spaces. The fact is that, though his domes may enclose some very seductive-seeming spaces, the structure is simply a means towards, the space merely a by-product of, the creation of an environment, and that given other technical means, Fuller might have satisfied his quest for ever higher environmental performance in some more ‘other’ way.
In a world reacting against modernity, this was an increasingly unpopular position. Philip Johnson suggested, ‘Let Bucky Fuller put together the Dymaxion dwellings of the people, so long as we architects can design their tombs and monuments.’ But Foster at this point in his career was content to regard architecture as it was conventionally practised as a dinosaur on the edge of oblivion. In his eyes, a more realistic approach to the issues facing the physical world required something else.
It is an attitude that reflects a certain view of architecture, one that shaped Foster’s thinking as a young architect when he was influenced by Reyner Banham. In sharp distinction to the idea of architecture as a matter of picturesque composition, whether in the Palladian or the Miesian manner, Banham looked for a fresh direction for architecture in the pursuit of technological development. He was fascinated by the Futurists and their worship of machines, and repelled by the cult of conservation, just gathering momentum in the England of the early 1960s.
Banham championed Foster in the early part of his career, because he saw in him, after his disappointments first with Peter and Alison Smithson, and then with James Stirling, as the British architect most likely to embody the kind of anti-monumental, technologically driven outsider architecture that he saw as the only worthwhile response to the contemporary world. Simply to go through the process of securing a commission and building it, no matter how much skill and effort might be employed in the process, is not enough. For the architect there needs to be a sense of narrative about why they are building, not just how. The rhetoric is rarely the same as the underlying psychological motivation.
Foster was influenced by conflicting impulses. He saw design as a means of transforming his world and that of others. He saw himself as a practical strategist, a man who could ask the right questions of his clients to solve the equally practical requirements of the situation facing them. But he began his career at a time when there was also an impatience with the mundane and a belief in the need for a constant openness to dealing with the results of the massive technological changes that the world seemed to be experiencing.
Banham was a fundamentalist. He questioned the very survival of architecture. As he saw it, architecture was already atrophying. In the near future it might well vanish altogether as a vital cultural activity. Life was changing faster and faster, so conventional architectural solutions were inevitably out of date by the time that they were completed. Unless architects could embrace an entirely new approach to their work, they would find themselves as redundant as swordsmiths, lithographers, and steel engravers.
This attitude induced a kind of delirium. Architects began to draw cities that could walk, and speculated about environments of infinite flexibility, and disposability, about plug-in cities, and thinkbelts and mobile universities.
There was certainly something of this view of architecture in the way that Foster set about his practice. But he was driven by a series of contradictory concerns. The picturesque townscape campaigns of the Architectural Review that suggested painting grey concrete in pastel shades, pedestrianisation, bollards and hanging baskets of flowers, while too saccharine sweet for some tastes, left a mark on his thinking. He was also fascinated by the aesthetics of aircraft, of mechanisms, of high-performance machinery.
Foster’s work shifts imperceptibly back and forth from the rhetoric of the supremely practical to the messianically fervent, from the off-the-peg instant office to the city-in-a-single-building skyscraper, from the methodical, purposeful, reassuring voice of Foster the pilot to Foster the dreaming visionary planning a vertical city.
Foster’s character is marked by a continual restlessness, a constant sense that things could have been done differently, and a never-ending speculation about how things could be if only he had a chance to start over again.
If Foster had managed, through design, to transform his own life since he left that simple room looking at the railway line in Levenshulme, Fuller was telling him there was more to it than that. More to it than the look of a particular room. Fuller was promising to redesign the entire planet and transform everybody’s lives, and challenging Foster to do the same.
The pair first met in 1971, when Fuller was in Britain looking for an architect to work with him on the design of the Samuel Beckett Theatre beneath St Peter’s College in Oxford. The Beckett Theatre was a somewhat vague and ill-defined project that for a while Richard Burton was interested in backing. St Peter’s, a relatively new and far from wealthy foundation, wanted to establish itself as a centre for creativity. Francis Warner, an academic in the English faculty, conceived the idea of an experimental theatre, secured Beckett’s permission to use his name, and rounded up representatives of the great and the good, including Burton, Henry Moore, and Maurice Bowra, to start fund-raising. They hired Fuller to work on the design, a spectacularly radical choice, given that Fuller had never attempted anything remotely like it before, and that his first thought was to bury the theatre beneath the college. A submarine under the quadrangle, Foster called it.
The introduction was made by James Meller, a colleague of Foster’s. They met for lunch at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London.
In those days it was a very elegant series of Nash rooms, not the ICA it has since morphed into. I had got the office all organised to receive Bucky, but he didn’t come that time. I was trying to impress him that I was the person to collaborate with, but I did not get much of a word in edgeways. I didn’t realise then that he was subtly interviewing me. I was talking to Bucky about the ecological approach that we were taking on the project for Olsen’s offices at Vestby in Norway. We planned to pull in cool air from the forest floor to condition the building, and to use sun reflectors to warm it in the morning. And we designed fluorescent lighting that would extract heat at source from the fittings. I didn’t use the word green or sustainable, they just weren’t in the lexicon, but it was an environmental approach that struck a chord with Bucky.
By the end of lunch Fuller had decided Foster was going to be his collaborator. Over the course of their twelve-year friendship, Fuller and Foster worked together on several experimental projects. The final phase of the design of the Willis Faber Building gave rise to Climatoffice: a study for a contemporary adaptable workplace. They designed solar-powered houses for Foster and Fuller’s own use, and a dome for the Knoxville World’s Fair in 1982. But these projects, like the theatre, were never realised.
Throughout the early part of his career, Foster established connections with major historical figures in the world of design. When he needed advice on some aspect of a project, he would seek out an expert whose pioneering work in that field had inspired him. Faced with the technical demands of the cladding system for Willis Faber, he flew to Paris for lunch with Jean Prouve, the engineer, architect, designer and manufacturer who could be seen as the father of British high-tech architecture. Prouve subsequently visited London for a more detailed discussion; he came away from Foster’s presentation saying that he had nothing to teach him, but that he shared his passion for gliding.
When Fuller’s death left Foster without an older figure to look to, the gap was filled for a time by Otl Aicher, the charismatic German graphic designer. Asked why he wanted Aicher to work with him on a signage system for HSBC in the early 1980s, Foster replied simply, ‘Because he is the greatest designer living today’.
Aicher, like Fuller, had a utopian vision of the world, and also like Fuller, he came to architecture at an oblique angle. Born in 1922, Aicher married Inge Scholl, sister of the martyred German anti-Nazi campaigners Hans and Sophie Scholl, who established the White Rose League and refused to compromise in their protests against Hitler even though they knew the inevitable outcome. Aicher was at school with Scholl’s brother, and trained as a graphic designer. After the war, Aicher and Scholl established the Ulm School of Design. It was a shortlived institution that closed in factional acrimony in the 1960s, but for a while it was the focus for a principled and austere form of modernity that plausibly set itself up as the spiritual heir to the moral authority of the Bauhaus.
Ulm became a battleground between opposing ideas of what design might be. Aicher’s adversaries included the critic Tomas Maldonado and the designer Max Bill. Aicher and Bill clashed over the Ulm curriculum, with Aicher winning out in his argument that fine art had no place there. While at Ulm, and later in independent practice, Aicher had a huge influence on design, creating a new image for Lufthansa, then for the Munich Olympics in 1972, and helping to shape the German Federal Republic’s identity as a modern, democratic state.
Aicher made design into a kind of moral crusade, in a way that caught Foster’s imagination. In Gavriel David Rosenfeld’s Munich and Memory, there is a quote from Aicher that reveals how hard he worked to deal with the past. In the highly charged context of an Olympic games set in Munich, the city where Hitler began his rise to power, it was important to Aicher to avoid using what he called ‘the preferred colours of dictators; red, and gold as well as purple, the colour of secular or religious power’. He had a life-long antipathy to the use of capital letters, suggesting that if only Germans had been less partial to their pomposity, they might have resisted fascism more readily.
Aicher was the creator of Rotis, the type font named after the village in which he had his studio for many years. Rotis became synonymous with the identity of Foster’s practice and his buildings. Local sensitivities prevented Foster from working with him in Hong Kong, but Aicher’s Rotis font did appear carved in the Portland stone walls of Foster’s Great Court at the British Museum. It was used for the Foster letterhead, and on the directional system for the Bilbao metro system that he designed for Foster. Aicher helped to shape Foster’s books and presentations. More than anything, he impressed Foster with his unshakeable conviction that design could be about big ideas.
Their relationship was more personal than professional. Foster spent all the time that he could with Aicher, learning from his intensity. The two of them worked on Foster’s book; flying to Wiltshire, spending time over layouts in the studio, but also taking long walks to see the ancient white horse carved in chalk at Uffington, the neolithic sites at Silbury Hill, and the Ridgeway.
Writing of Foster’s buildings, Aicher suggests that they:
… can be read, and understood. You discover them. What you see is what it is because it is more reasonable than the other way round. You discover ideas, logic, wit. It is not pure mood aesthetics, dull feeling. There is also no zeitgeist expressed here, no world feeling, one sees one of the best possible solutions to a set of questions.
It is another version of Buckminster Fuller’s vision of architecture based on performance, not formalism.
Foster was shaken by Aicher’s death in 1991. In the week before he died suddenly in a traffic accident, Foster had, on an impulse that came close to premonition, flown to Germany to have dinner with his friend. As a tribute, he helped to publish an English translation of Aicher’s writings. In the foreword he wrote, ‘We felt that it was important to respect Otl’s passionate objection to capital letters for starting sentences or marking traditionally important words.’
But it is his description of Aicher that is the most striking. Foster writes, ‘Often as he was talking, Otl would pick up a piece of paper and illustrate his point with careful strokes of a ballpoint.’ Foster could have been describing himself.
Before he died, Fuller dedicated the first copy of the Dymaxion Map to Foster. He still has it, along with a so-called fly’s-eye dome, twelve feet across, that Fuller produced in the 1970s and which is now kept at Foster’s home in Switzerland.
Typically a Buckminster Fuller dome is composed of rods, sometimes combined with cables. It produces something that is incredibly strong with very little mass, very little weight, and extraordinary performance. And just when you thought that you had really second-guessed Bucky on what his next dome would be like, more of the same, but with a more complex geometry, he comes up with something completely different. The fly’s-eye dome is a series of moulded pieces which when they are bolted together produce a dome. Instead of it being solid it has very large holes, slightly extruded. They are like big eyes and because of the stiffening collar around the holes and the structural continuity it produces something that is recognisably a Bucky dome but different from any dome that Bucky had ever done before.
Foster was with Fuller when he was working on its design and sketched it in his notebook; Foster bought it from the Fuller family estate at the time of the Fuller retrospective at the Whitney Museum.
Fuller left Foster not just with the interest in challenging orthodox structural geometries that resulted in the Swiss Re tower in London and the Hearst tower in Manhattan, both of which can be seen as owing a debt to Fuller, but also with a readiness to think on an all-embracing scale.
Bucky was always about taking the long view. If he were here now he’d be very eloquently and elegantly demonstrating the imperative to invest in the research for renewable forms of energy, to replace fossil fuels. He’d also link that to the scarcity of conventional fuels and the propensity of that to spark off wars and all the horrors that follow from that. Bucky had that broader perspective.
Foster has built an architectural practice on a scale that few, if any, have matched, a task that requires an entirely businesslike approach. But more than that he has always looked for ways to respond to the challenge that Fuller set him. Buckminster Fuller speculated about a dome over Manhattan. To judge by Masdar, the zero-carbon city for 100,000 people that Foster is building in Abu Dhabi where mass transit will take the form of as-yet-to-be-manufactured driverless electric vehicles, Foster could actually build that dome.