Even if he is determined to present his architecture as essentially democratic in the way that European modernists of a particular kind have always tried to do, Norman Foster is not given to taking overtly political stands. Usually, he confines himself to those issues that are related directly to architecture. He did sign a letter to the Sunday Times in support of Richard Rogers, taking issue with the Prince of Wales’s attempts to set himself up as an arbiter of public taste. He supports a charity building schools in Sierra Leone. But he has never put his name to more clearly political causes.
He was introduced to the House of Lords in the summer of 1999 by Lord Weidenfeld and Lord Sainsbury, as a politically neutral crossbench peer, and he made his politely well-intentioned but uncontroversial maiden speech on the importance of design four years later. He suggested that ‘a debate about design is, for me, a debate about values, because I sincerely believe that there is a moral imperative for good design; to do it well and responsibly. Design is not an add-on, it is not a cosmetic, it is not window-dressing.’ But Foster avoids involvement in the craft of everyday party politics, or of government. Unlike Rogers, who as a working Labour peer can be found haunting Westminster’s lobbies, sitting on task forces, and putting his name to policy documents, Foster is essentially an apolitical public figure who seldom attends parliament. His extensive experience of working in China, Russia and the Islamic world has left him reluctant to accept unchallenged Western claims to have a monopoly on the democratic virtues. Given the fact of the US Military Commission Act of 2006 which legitimised torture in the name of homeland security and British complicity in that policy, he cites the double standards of the Western powers when challenged about the implications of working in states with clouded records on civil rights.
But his approach to politics is more concerned with the tactics of building in a complex world. At a philosophical scale, he has the utopian streak inherited from Buckminster Fuller, complete with all the attendant inherent paradoxes. He is patently sincere about the green imperative, but he nevertheless leaves a conspicuous carbon footprint as he constantly criss-crosses the globe, underwritten by a personal carbon offset scheme. In his House of Lords speech he described design as:
a core, primary activity because anything in any part of the world that we inhabit has to be made. But before it is made it has to be designed. There are no exceptions, whether it is on the scale of a city, the infrastructure of its buildings, the equipment in them, the infrastructure of streets and public spaces, pavements, the paving slabs, the door handles and even the invisible digital electronic world – it all has to be designed. It is a human act because design is a response to the needs of people, whether they are spiritual or material. The quality of that design affects the quality of all of our lives.
Designers continually face new challenges, some caused by irresponsible past strategies, the threat of global warming and population growth. They affect the balance of an island nation as much as a mega-city on the Pacific Rim. The challenges are the same, only the scale varies. I passionately believe that we have to build more densely in urban areas and – a vital coupling – when we do that we have to improve the standard of urban living. It may mean building taller, but not always. It certainly means producing more housing of higher quality and at lower cost. I believe passionately that history is on the side of the density argument. Buildings consume half the energy produced in an industrialised society; transport and industry, the infrastructure, the remainder. Given the link between energy production, pollution and global warming, the threat to the fragile planet’s eco-system, there are strong arguments for reducing the energy demands in building and infrastructure. The quest for a greener, more ecologically responsible design is not about fashion, but about survival. Designers can advocate with passion, but in the end they are only as good as those who lead; those who have the courage and the political will to set standards and raise goals.
Whatever public stances Foster does or does not take, avoiding dealing with the political aspects of architecture while running a practice with the scale and worldwide reach that his has is not an option. Architecture is an arm of statecraft, a means of representing national aspirations and a way to define power and territory. That is why architects with Foster’s blend of sophistication and toughness get hired. Their architecture is used to build a sense of shared national identity, and to mark and even to shape the course of historical events. To realise architecture on a public scale demands an engagement with the powerful. It is a relationship based on mutual dependence, but it is never the architect who is in command. The successful architect is the one who is most able to use his client to realise his architectural vision, without it becoming entirely subordinated to political calculation, or worse, to the megalomania of power.
The imponderable question is, which side gets the better of the bargain? Is architecture the product of power, or is that power in fact an outcome of the exercise of architecture? As Foster has grown older and more materially successful, he has had more and more occasion to face those questions.
Within the hermetic bubble of the architectural world, a building can plausibly be read as having one, possibly harmless, set of meanings. In the wider world, beyond that bubble, it will almost certainly have an entirely different meaning.
Kazakhstan is a young state which has an unusually evenly balanced mix of the world’s religious faiths, thanks to Stalin’s use of the republic, with its climatic extremes, as a penal colony in which to dump his victims from all over the Soviet Union. Its president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, commissioned a glass-tipped stone-faced pyramid from Foster for his new capital Astana. Nazarbayev described it as the Palace of Peace and Reconciliation; a multi-faith monument and conference centre-cum-opera house.
Narrowly defined as a work of architecture, it can be understood as a not very successful example of Foster’s purist manner. A wider understanding of its meaning would be as a more or less successful act of self-aggrandisement or nation building – take your pick – by a ruler whose administration has been plagued by allegations of nepotism, corruption and wrongdoing with even the president’s own family implicated. In spite of the fact that at least two leaders of opposition political parties have died in suspicious circumstances, the West continues to support Nazarbayev, who presides over the most stable and oil-rich state in a particularly troubled region.
Nazarbayev presents the pyramid as a symbol of religious tolerance. For Foster, it is the product of building in the most challenging circumstances and timescale. In the remotest of locations, with the most extreme climate conditions, the project was completed within two years, and in the face of a last-minute addition of a full-size opera house to the brief.
Foster has an acute sense for the symbolic qualities of architecture, beyond the overt functional role that it is conventionally expected to play. Ask him which of his buildings he feels is his most successful, and unhesitatingly he will name the new Reichstag in Berlin, closely followed by the Pont Millau, the sublime road bridge in the South of France that marches in seven giant, stately steps across the River Tarn, as far above the valley floor as the tip of the Eiffel Tower is off the ground.
Foster identifies the essential qualities of both structures as being rooted in their symbolic value. ‘Like the Pont Millau, which has come to define a whole region, what makes the Reichstag special is that it has transcended the boundaries of its material function and it has come to symbolise a city, and even a nation,’ he says.
But it wasn’t only the symbolic value of the Pont Millau that Foster had in mind when he anxiously came to inspect the impact of the decision he had made to colour the cables and the handrails white, rather than black. It was their visual impact against the sky he was assessing. Would white make them look more, or less intrusive? He had chosen white as the way to make the visually unimportant elements of the design as invisible as possible on the basis of a long-ago conversation with Henry Moore when they were positioning his reclining figure at the Sainsbury Centre. Looking at the finished bridge, it is clear that he took the right decision.
France is not Kazakhstan, but it is a state which places a strong emphasis on the political uses of architecture. Working with Michel Virlogeux, the French engineer who was responsible for the calculations on which the design depends, in the Pont Millau Foster produced a design which triumphantly demonstrates that it is still possible to make utilitarian structures look beautiful in a contemporary way. And not uncoincidentally it gave the French president, Jacques Chirac, a memorable photo opportunity when he opened the tallest bridge in the world at the end of 2004. At a time when his standing in the opinion polls was lower than any other president in the entire term of the Fifth Republic, he was able for a moment at least to look decisive, in command, and as if he were adding to his nation’s prestige.
Foster’s reconstruction of the burnt-out shell of the Reichstag in Berlin was loaded with symbolic meaning in a way that goes far beyond the creation of a landmark. It represents, among many other things, the reunification of the two Germanies, a new German commitment to environmental sustainability, with its biomass-fuelled air conditioning system, as well as a particularly unthreatening form of the expression of national identity. Foster + Partners is, after all, still regarded in Germany as a British firm even as it grows steadily more cosmopolitan in the national origins of its staff and its worldwide reach. And for a non-German to be invited to play such a key role in shaping an essential national landmark for Germany was clearly no accident, but an entirely deliberate decision intended to reflect on the character of the state. Indeed, when Foster was first invited by the president of the German parliament, Rita Suüssmuth, to take part in the competition to design the building, while he realised that it would be impossible to refuse, he thought it inconceivable that a non-German would ever secure such a highly charged commission.
During the long-drawn-out design process – the scheme went through at least three different incarnations before it was finally completed in 1999 – Foster found himself continually having to deal with the political meanings of his architectural decisions. Everything about the Reichstag, from the shape of its roof, to the colour of its walls, to the glint in the eye of the eagle that serves to represent the authority of the German parliament to govern, and which dominates the debating chamber, in the end had to be understood as political issues.
In 1991, when an almost evenly divided German parliament voted narrowly in favour of relocating itself back to Berlin from Bonn, where the federal government had sat out the Cold War, the national mood was expansive. Germany was looking for a flamboyant and monumental gesture with which to celebrate the reunification of the state.
The Reichstag’s baroque revival stone hulk had survived the fire allegedly started by a Dutch Communist arsonist in 1933 that gave Hitler his excuse to seize absolute power. The parliament building had been shattered by shell and tank fire as the Red Army fought its way into Berlin in the last days of the Second World War. There followed a desultory attempt at restoring the building in a still divided city, but the Reichstag failed to find a satisfactory new role. Just a few metres away from the wall, with its death strip of mines and razor wire patrolled by dogs and watched over by machine-gun posts that the East Germans had built to slice the city in half, it was all but cut off from the rest of West Berlin, and almost unusable.
In the context of a reunited Berlin, it had be adapted to function on a practical level. The new Reichstag needed to take account of the changed circumstances of the city if it was to work as a piece of urbanism. It also had to serve as a physical representation of how the new Germany felt about itself.
Foster was one of three finalists in the competition to remodel the building. The eighty German entrants had all been eliminated, leaving him pitched against the Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava and Pi de Bruijn from the Netherlands. Calatrava had made a reputation for himself as the designer of crowd-pleasing bridges that took the form of strong architectural gestures by looking for inspiration in organic natural forms. De Bruijn had been responsible for expanding the legislature in The Hague, demonstrating a strong technical grasp of the issues involved in planning a parliament. Foster had a larger office than his two rivals, a track record that included a wider range of buildings, and a reputation for building specifically modern landmarks such as his skyscraper for the Commerzbank in Frankfurt, a project that appealed to the taste of the German political class, who preferred confident neutral modernism to overemphatic postmodernism.
In what could be understood as an act of exorcism of Berlin’s recent history, as well as of Germany’s troubled past, Foster proposed placing a steel-and-glass canopy soaring over the reconstructed stone shell of Paul Wallot’s original building. Resembling a giant table sitting on top of the parliament, it would have entirely transformed its meaning, rendering the project a memorial to the past, while at the same time demonstrating that the new parliament building signified a departure from history. It rightly emerged as the favoured design among the three finalists. It had something new to say, in a way that its competitors did not.
But once the euphoria of German reunification had evaporated and the taxpayers of the old West Germany began to grasp the financial implications of bringing the ramshackle infrastructure of the DDR up to Western standards, all three architects involved in the competition were asked to take part in a second round. Their instructions were to find a way to make their designs cheaper.
It was an overly simple question that Foster did not feel comfortable trying to answer. ‘They asked us to shrink the brief. It was as if they had asked us to design a bus, and then come back for us to turn it into a people mover,’ says Foster.
Calatrava and de Bruijn set about finding ways of reducing the cost of their initial proposals, but typically Foster wanted to start again with a clean sheet. Because it was far from clear exactly how much Germany was prepared to spend on its parliament, it was not a straightforward process.
‘We asked for a budget, but they wouldn’t give us one,’ says Foster. So he came up with what seemed like an appropriate notional building cost, based on a calculation of what an acceptable level of running costs would amount to. There was also a need to explore exactly what elements of government would be located within the building. In the first round of the competition, Foster had envisaged locating the party caucus rooms that are an essential part of the German democratic system elsewhere, while Pi de Bruijn advocated placing the debating chamber in a detached structure.
The new Foster proposal would concentrate functional elements within one building, while reining back on ceremonial and monumental space. The result was a much simpler, and far more modest building: the soaring canopy disappeared and the new debating chamber was inserted behind the restored stone façade. It won the final phase of the competition.
There was no sign in the winning design of the rectangular based dome that had been the most conspicuous element in the original building – inspired in part by Vanbrugh’s design for Blenheim Palace. Every trace of that original dome had been destroyed by a combination of war, fire, neglect, and post-war rebuilding. To make a literal reconstruction of how it had once looked went counter to all the architectural principles that Foster had come to believe in. Yet to a vocal and influential minority within Germany, it would be unthinkable to build a new parliament without a dome. In their eyes a dome is as much an essential representation of Germany as the clock tower of the Palace of Westminster is for Britain.
As soon as we were appointed, there was a campaign led by the Right in the parliament demanding that we reconstruct the dome. I was so hostile to the idea that I said if they insisted on a dome then we should cut the contract in two. We would do our bit, and leave the rest to somebody else.
It was an uncharacteristically demonstrative gesture. Foster has built his career by making the most of an apparently imperturbable façade. He certainly does have a will that is not lightly to be challenged, but it isn’t often on show to his clients.
The Christian Democratic Union was backing a proposal put forward by a German architect to add a historically faithful reconstruction of the Reichstag’s original dome to Foster’s proposal. Outright opposition to the idea would, in the charged climate of debate on the issue, have weakened Foster’s position and compromised the design. Instead he backed down far enough, if not to produce a dome of his own, then at least to design a marker that demonstrated on the outside of the building how much had changed inside.
He describes the glass spiral that sits on the roof of the rebuilt structure as a cupola, and maintains that its shape is not a recreation of the flattened dome that topped the old Reichstag: ‘As I thought more about it, I began to work on the idea of making a sign to show that something has changed at the Reichstag. The building has been transformed internally, and that is being manifested on the outside.’
While the Reichstag still looks a massive, and essentially traditional stone building from the outside, once you are inside the debating chamber the masonry is revealed as no more than a taut skin, one that barely contains the spatially explosive interior. This is no longer a building with a Beaux-Arts plan and a traditional sensibility. It has been transformed into a spectacular and entirely new single-volume space.
For Foster, the glass structure on the roof of the parliament is important because it reflects a new life on the inside. But it is more than a formal gesture. It has a functional role too. The dome is there to ventilate the debating chamber and to bring daylight into the heart of the building in an energy-efficient way. At the same time, it creates a public viewing platform, looking out over the whole of Berlin.
The first drawings for the cupola hinted that there could be a cylinder on the roof of the parliament radiating beams of light out over the city, as if it were a lighthouse, like something that might have been imagined by the German expressionists from the 1920s such as Bruno Taut and Paul Scheerbart.
Foster began the design process by envisaging all these as distinct elements, or unconnected episodes in a narrative, before coming up with a means for realising them in a workable way as part of a single coherent strategy:
I remember agonising for a long period with David Nelson, struggling hard to understand how we could make the dome channel light inside the debating chamber and also to understand how we could bring the public up to the building at roof level. At first the ideas that we had come up with were not connected. We made huge 1:20 scale models of the dome, and also of the chamber. They were big enough for three people to stand up in at the same time. We hauled them up to the top of the Reichstag to see how things would work in situ. The only way that we could get the model and ourselves on the roof was to take them up in the bucket of a crane. We wanted to see if it would really make the interior lighter in winter and if it was possible to use the cupola to act as a screen in summer.
In the end, these initial ideas were synthesised in a glass structure with a spiralling access ramp, and an array of mirrors hanging over the chamber below to direct sunlight into the interior. This was a new version of an idea that has continually recurred in Foster’s work, ever since he proposed something like it for his scheme for Fred Olsen’s offices in the Norwegian forest, and installed a sun scoop on the outside of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank to track the sun and direct it down into the tower’s atrium. He was using a mechanism to cancel out the effects of architecture.
In Norway, Foster wanted to minimise disturbance to the woodland site that Olsen had chosen for its headquarters. The image he had of the building was of a machine that gave the impression that it had temporarily alighted in the forest, and was prepared to take off again just as gently as it had arrived, without leaving a mark. The intention had been to mount a series of mirrors on the roof, deployed at an angle that would catch the glancing rays of the sun and divert them down into the centre of the deep open-plan offices, thus making the most of the weak sunlight in that far northern latitude.
The sun-scoop concept was taken further in Hong Kong. There are twin arrays of mirrors, one located outside the building, on the south face at the level of the first double-height suspension truss, the other inside at the same level, at the top of the atrium of the banking hall. The outer array is mounted on a set of runners driven by pre-programmed electric motors that allow it to track the sun, catch its rays, and beam them on to the interior mirrors that in turn reflect them down into the atrium and on to the floor of the banking hall. Minute computer-controlled adjustments to the angle of the sequence of mirrors were calculated and preset to track the varying path of the sun during different seasons and to make the most of the available light by avoiding the internal structure. As a result, the sun’s rays work their way down one side of the interior of the atrium and across the floor every day, transforming the interior with the qualities of natural light. It is perhaps the single most audacious idea that Foster has ever realised. It cancels out the effect of the plan and section, and creates architecture that is more like a responsive mechanism than a passive system.
The origins of the sun scoop can be traced all the way back to the young Foster’s bicycle ride to Jodrell Bank in 1957, to see Manchester University’s huge 76-metre-diameter steerable radio telescope, with its breathtaking white-painted steel dish supported on a substructure that could be made to move gently up and down in pursuit of the vapour trails left by the booster rockets falling away from the aftermath of the first Sputnik launch.
For Foster, the Reichstag roof was a means to achieve better environmental conditions, to provide public access, and to symbolise the new political order that had called the structure into being. To his embittered architectural rival Santiago Calatrava, it was a dome. And not just any dome. It was a dome that Calatrava accused Foster of having stolen from his unsuccessful competition entry. Calatrava wrote angry letters to everybody that he could think of, from Helmut Kohl downward. He threatened to take Germany to court, and wanted to sue Foster.
It was not the first time Calatrava had been moved to litigation. He took on the municipalities of both Bilbao and Barcelona for allegedly tampering with his bridges. In the end, it all came to nothing. Foster quietly pointed out that while Calatrava’s design had indeed included a glass dome, it had four sides, unlike his. In any case, the idea was hardly an original one. Berlin is a city with hundreds of domes to learn from, so why would Foster have chosen to copy Calatrava’s?
Calatrava remains angry about Berlin. At the time of the opening of the Reichstag, the Spanish newspaper El País asked him if he had recovered from the experience. ‘Yes, but everything was turning to shit. I was on the verge of closing the studio.’ He refused to answer the newspaper’s questions about whether or not he was on speaking terms with Foster, and went on to compare himself, with no false modesty, to Bach and to Frank Lloyd Wright: ‘I am with him when he says that, with truth on his side, he is ready to take on the world. There is truth in my structures.’
The dome was not the only architectural issue with a political dimension that Foster had to deal with at the Reichstag. Towards the end of the building process, while in the course of guiding Helmut Kohl on a hard-hat tour of the construction site, he found himself subjected to a sermon from the German chancellor on youth, colour and architecture, peppered with appropriate historical references. This was not a purely rhetorical outburst. Kohl was determined that, whatever his architect believed, the parliament of the German Federal Republic would have a colour scheme considerably brighter than the intentionally sober debating chamber that Foster had proposed. White and grey, silver and black and might be fine for architects to live with, but ordinary Germans needed something more cheerful – or so Kohl believed. And in the end he got his way, even if, in the normal course of events, German building contracts give architects considerably more authority than British ones do.
Despite the fact that Foster’s official client was not the chancellor but a specially designated parliamentary subcommittee, led by the president of the chamber, Rita Süssmuth, Foster thought again. He asked the Danish graphic designer Per Arnoldi to take another look at the colour palette, which accounts for a rather more vivid interior than the one that Foster had originally intended.
Foster’s experiences with Kohl bring home the difference between architecture and art. Years later, Foster got to know Richard Serra, an artist who had been engaged to work on another major project in Berlin, collaborating with the architect Peter Eisenman on the Holocaust memorial next to the Brandenburg Gate. Serra resigned after a meeting with Kohl made it brutally clear to him that the Chancellor of the German Federal Republic expected to have his views on matters of artistic policy respected. Architects do not have the same room for manoeuvre.
Kohl did, however, back Foster’s decision to expose the graffiti left on the Reichstag’s walls by the Red Army. The Russians stormed the building twice in 1945; the first time to flush out German snipers, the second, a few days later, for the benefit of the film crews attempting to immortalise the heroism of Soviet soldiers. However unpalatable it might be to some of the chamber’s more conservative politicians, who interpret the sometimes obscene Cyrillic scrawls as a desecration, they form an essential part of German history. Foster quickly had these difficult traces of the recent past carefully photographed to provide a record so that they could not casually be wiped out.
Of all the political debates about design at the Reichstag, none took more time and proved ultimately more futile than resolving the issue of the shape of the eagle that symbolises the authority of the German state and which dominates the debating chamber.
The controversy about the eagle goes back to the founding of the German Federal Republic from the ruins of the Third Reich. It was conceived as a liberal new state, rooted in the conviction of its founders that Germany could never again allow itself to succumb to the horror of a dictatorship, or to become an international aggressor. It was a view that shaped everything, from the country’s legal system and its constitution, to its foreign policy, and the nature of German architecture.
Part of the price Germany paid for its liberation from the terrible memory of its recent past was to be the abolition of monumental architecture. Assertive architecture of any kind, and in particular any reference to classicism, became impossible, for the next fifty years at least. And so the eagle in the debating chamber of the Bonn parliament was designed to look as peaceable, and as unlike the martial insignia adopted by the Nazis, as the expressionist sculptor Ludwig Gies could make it. The result was the singularly unaerodynamic form of the so-called ‘fat hen’, which for many Germans born during or just after the Second World War is a key part of their identity. With reunification there was a new Germany which demanded another iconography to represent it.
Foster wanted to come up with something still unthreatening, but rather more elegant than the hen. For a while he became obsessed with eagles. He drew them endlessly, collecting shelves full of reference books. He looked at heraldic precedents for Austrian eagles and German eagles. He even spent a couple of hours motionless in a Japanese mountain valley drawing eagles in flight from life.
He ended up with a futile presentation of his suggestions for a new eagle to sixty parliamentarians in a Berlin committee room. After heated and prolonged debate on the options, they insisted on sticking with the fat hen, to Foster’s dismay:
I showed quite a number of eagle options, but the chances were that if anybody fell in love with one of them, there were all kinds of reasons for everybody else not to. The eagle debate was intense, and highly emotional. We finally came down to a modified version of the familiar eagle. It is a somewhat fitter version of the original but still not as lean as I would have liked.
The result is made from cast aluminium and weighs two and a half tons. ‘There is a reverse side to the eagle in the chamber that nobody ever sees. If they did, some might say that it seems to be giving a sly wink and a grin.’
The design of the seating layout in the Reichstag was equally long-drawn-out. ‘We looked at many different layouts, from circles and semi-circles to the British model of opposing benches. We did full-size mock-ups of the seats. In the end, it was a balance between enjoying an intimate setting and avoiding too much proximity between individuals.’
Foster succeeded in giving modern Germany a new landmark, one which, just before construction started, went through the ritual of its wrapping by Christo and Jean-Claude, to emerge after the rebuilding process in a new form that has wiped away memories of the smoke billowing from the old dome on the night in 1933 when its torching served as the signal for Hitler to seize power.
The experience of the Reichstag was an object lesson in the craft of politics for Foster. ‘It was the first building that we had done that was fought and won in public by the media,’ he recalls. ‘Our design sessions with the politicians were supposed to be closed and confidential. Yet you could see them running out to phone the papers before we had even finished talking, and you would read about everything that had been said in print the following morning.’
It was not to be the last time that Foster found the details of the design process turned into the subject of newspaper headlines. This is nowhere more true than in London, where his growing material success has given him a visibility that very few British architects ever achieve, and so has made him a target for often hostile press attention. It is the kind of attention that at times has overshadowed his architecture. The unveiling of the British Museum’s Great Court, for example, should have been one of the defining buildings of Norman Foster’s career. But in public relations terms, the museum’s opening of the £97 million project just after the Millennium could not have got off to a worse start. The museum was accused of just about everything from dereliction of duty to bad faith in its attempts to make good the void torn out of its heart by the departure of the British Library for St Pancras. There were also claims that the museum was playing fast and loose with its planning permission by building the new glass roof over the courtyard a fraction too high.
Jocelyn Stevens, the excitable former head of English Heritage, joined the fight with relish, calling for the resignation of Graham Greene, chairman of the trustees, over what he claimed was the failure of the museum to treat its building – Sir Robert Smirke’s Grade One-listed masterpiece – with sufficient respect. He claimed that the trustees knew that the stone being used was not the Portland stone specified in the contract, but was, in fact, a cheaper French substitute, which might meet the letter of the specification but wasn’t what Smirke had selected when he designed the museum in 1823. What was more, this consignment of supposedly inferior stone was being offloaded at a premium price.
Stevens called for the royal opening of the museum’s courtyard to be postponed until the offending work could be demolished and rebuilt using genuine Portland stone. Given that the museum’s finances were already stretched beyond any acceptable limit, it was clearly an unreasonable suggestion. The controversial limestone that the museum’s contractors used came from the French rather than the English end of the bed of oolitic limestone that runs under the Channel. The English variety, from Dorset, was chosen to match the original Great Court of 150 years ago. The French variety, known as Anstrude Roche Claire limestone, was a little softer, a little easier to carve, and marginally cheaper. But while the commissioners of English Heritage rebuked the museum for their handling of the affair, in the end they could not bring themselves to say that the French stone represented enough of a discernable loss of quality for them to call for the courtyard to be rebuilt.
Ten years later, the stone episode has joined the abundant lore of colourful scandal that has been a constant part of the museum’s history. The magnificent main façade, for example, was built in the 1840s by Baker and Sons, a firm that hadn’t submitted the lowest tender for the job, but which, according to J. Mordaunt Crook’s riveting architectural history of the museum, did have the vital qualification of a managing director married to the architect’s sister.
Foster’s task, on which he worked closely with Spencer de Grey, was a complex one. The brief called for the creation of a new use for the centre of the museum that would integrate it with the existing galleries. What’s more, they needed to find a way to do all this while remaining respectful of the original building, even in areas that had been hidden by random accretions of crude makeshift additions over many decades.
The original courtyard at the heart of the museum didn’t get built in one go. It took almost twenty-five years to finish. So it would never have been entirely uniform. It had always displayed the wear and the scars of the passing of time and had only existed in its planned state for the seven years from 1847 to 1854. At almost two acres, it was bigger than Hanover Square, but according to Thomas Watts, assistant to Anthony Panizzi, the greatest of the librarians of the British Museum, it was ‘a dead loss’. Another critic called it the ‘finest mason’s yard in Europe’. Members of the public were never allowed into what was, by one account, ‘a mere well of malaria, a pestilent congregation of vapours’.
The original portico was hacked about to make way for the Reading Room, and when the museum was subjected to the dubious care of the Ministry of Public Building and Works there was constant damage from alterations carried out with all the tenderness of an army of occupation. On top of that the museum sustained damage during the Second World War from a hail of incendiaries, compounded by water penetration from the hoses of the fire brigade in an effort to put out the blaze.
When rebuilding architecture with such a complex history, what do you restore? Smirke had wanted an open courtyard, so do you demolish the Reading Room – the cuckoo planted in the nest – in the interests of authenticity? Do you plough it up and devote it to growing exotic botanical specimens, as Smirke had originally wanted? Do you restore the porticoes around the courtyard to look the way that they were actually built, or do you rebuild them in the manner that Smirke would have built them if the cash had been available to him?
To get to the north wing in the way that Smirke wanted, visitors would have to come through the triumphant colonnade at the front of the museum, negotiate the entrance hall, go out again through the south portico, cross the courtyard, and mount an imposing flight of steps before passing through another, even more impressive portico. Economy reduced this passage from the majestic to something much more modest.
Foster’s portico was attacked for its materials and its workmanship. But it was not a reconstruction of something that Smirke had designed. It was a completely new design by Foster and Spencer de Grey that they had produced to deal with contemporary realities. Its deep central opening, and the square light at the upper level intended to give museum visitors a glimpse into the space, had no historical precedent.
Historical accuracy has always been a two-edged sword in architectural restoration projects. In the nineteenth century, William Morris established the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings to discourage the kind of over-enthusiastic restoration that in his lifetime took the form of demolishing perpendicular additions to early English gothic cathedrals in order to reconstruct them as the Victorians felt that they ought to have looked. To Morris, this was an act of vandalism that diminished the integrity of those fragments of the building that were genuine. He argued for a strategy of patching up and mending rather than pretending that the new work was anything but new.
Foster’s Great Court is not what Smirke designed, but it does give visitors the kind of spatial thrills that Smirke had intended. They move from the richly painted entrance hall into a sudden explosion of light and space beyond, under a remarkable, billowing, glass-and-steel roof that deals with the challenging task of accommodating a rectangular courtyard at the same time as allowing the circular Reading Room to poke through it. No two of the triangular glass panels are exactly the same; this was one of the first major Foster projects to reflect his developing interest in new geometries and much more fluid forms, made possible by new developments in digital modelling.
A mousehole entrance in the newly stone-faced Reading Room – here the stone comes from Spain rather than France – takes the visitor back a century into the most famous library in the world: the original bookstacks, desks and furniture are still intact.
The need to address an opening in a wall that has to respond simultaneously to the very different scale of the Reading Room on the inside and the courtyard on the outside is one of the classic problems of architecture. Foster had two thoughts. The first was to adopt the traditional device of applying oversized mouldings to scale up the outside of an opening determined by the smaller-scale interior. The mousehole materialised from his second thought: a plan to finesse the entrance to the Reading Room by placing an Anish Kapoor sculpture commissioned by the museum so that it both marked and concealed the opening. When the piece, a highly reflective sphere, was finally realised, the museum decided against placing it. This left the mousehole exposed, and there was no longer the option of going back to Foster’s first idea.
At the north side of the drum, the Reading Room sprouts a bustle to accommodate a series of curved terraces that cascade down from the top level. There are cafés, restaurants and a shop here. Then, through the second portico, visitors move on into the old north Reading Room, put to use as a temporary exhibition space, before heading out into the street.
It is this route which creates the other new meaning that Foster attempted to give the museum. The project is not just a question of patching up the aftermath of wrenching out the British Library, nor is it only a matter of creating a new circulation route to allow the 5.4 million visitors that come each year to negotiate the museum without turning the galleries into busy corridors. The Great Court was envisaged as a project on an urban scale. It was claimed that it would provide a new pedestrian route, allowing people to move through London, from Bloomsbury down to Covent Garden, by way of the Great Court and the newly cleared forecourt to the museum. For this reason, the museum initially tried to keep the court open outside normal visiting hours for the rest of the museum. But in the event the cost of doing this proved too much for a cash-strapped museum.
A more satisfactory outcome of Foster’s attempts at large-scale urbanism in London, initially at least, was the remodelling of Trafalgar Square. This involved closing the road on the north side, thus connecting the National Gallery directly with the square.
The controversy generated by the British Museum saga was, in the end, a debate about the quality of the stone selected to face the reconstructed courtyard. While there were some cultural conservatives who tried to suggest that a more traditionally trained architect would not have allowed his builders to use supposedly inferior French stone where British had been specified, the Foster team emerged unscathed from the British Museum. In the case of the Millennium Bridge, they found themselves under attack on a far more damaging issue: professional competence.
The footbridge opened in the blare of a crescendo of publicity. The first new Thames crossing in London for almost a century, it was located on the most conspicuous possible site in Britain, linking St Paul’s Cathedral with Tate Modern on the South Bank. And no sooner had it opened than it had to be closed to the public on grounds of safety.
The brief for the competition to design the bridge, organised by the Financial Times, was a paradoxical one. It had to be beautiful enough to be considered worthy of celebrating the millennium, but at the same time it had to be sufficiently invisible so as not to compromise the view of St Paul’s. The dean of the cathedral had already voiced his concern that the Gherkin would compete with St Paul’s dome, and the Prince of Wales had chimed in with his thoughts on the need to protect St Paul’s setting from modern intrusions.
Working with Anthony Caro, and the engineers from Ove Arup, Foster’s strategy was not to duck the challenge, but to make the bridge axial, formally aligned head on with Wren’s dome. He also suggested that the structure of the bridge should dissolve into something almost invisible. Its only significant presence would be at night, when it would read as a blade of light. For the engineers, that meant a low structure which did not have the effect of creating a visual tunnel, or cage. ‘We wanted people to be able to see out at every point,’ says Roger Ridsdill-Smith from Arup. ‘We saw it as a flying magic carpet, floating just above the river.’ The resulting design beat off a submission from Frank Gehry and Richard Serra to win the competition.
The bridge has the effect of changing not only how a key part of the river looks, but also how it functions. For the first time it became possible to walk directly from the trading floors and the corporate headquarters of the north bank to the south-of-the-river world of lock-up garages, council flats and railway arches that is still at the heart of the London borough of Southwark.
Southwark’s foreshore is one of the few vantage points from which it is possible to understand the pattern of London’s growth and to get a sense of the city as a physical entity. You can see the mark left on London’s topography by what, beneath all the reinforced concrete and plate glass, is visibly still the same marshy flood plain pockmarked with gravel banks that the invading legions of Emperor Claudius encountered in AD 43. From here you can read London’s history, economic and political, inscribed in the physical form of the city like the rings of a tree.
Despite such violent intrusions from the twentieth century as the instantly recognisable saw-toothed silhouettes of the Barbican’s towers and the stainless steel-faced tower that was once the National Westminster Bank’s high-rise headquarters, only the dome of St Paul’s itself stands out, clearly defined against the skyline and effortlessly crushing a riverfront scrum of mediocrity from the 1960s and 1970s.
As you walk across, the viewpoint shifts and the dome of the cathedral gets bigger and bigger, until you find yourself drawn into the north bank, where it appears almost vertically above you at the top of a river of stone steps. Stop midstream, and there is the remarkable sense of being afloat on a waterscape as if you were on a tightly rigged racing catamaran.
Spanning a fifth of a mile of water with just two supports is no party trick. Rather than pumping up the structure like a bodybuilder on steroids, the bridge has muscles that ripple under the skin, like a sleek racehorse. And this was to be the trigger for one of the most difficult moments in Foster’s career.
It was just after 9 a.m. on a sunny Saturday in June 2000 that the Millennium Bridge first began to wobble. Roger Ridsdill-Smith spotted the first sign of movement as he stood waiting for the start of a sponsored walk. The bridge was beginning to fill with people at the time. ‘It happened quite fleetingly, but you could tell it wasn’t just a judder; it was a resonant movement. I thought, “That’s interesting”, but as the numbers thinned out, the bridge calmed down again.’
Then, at lunchtime when the bridge finally opened to the public, the crowds swarmed on from both ends. And that’s when the bridge really started to move. All 690 tons of its steel-and-aluminium deck began to sway left and right like a giant executive desktop toy, so much so that pedestrians, suspended above the Thames on slender steel cables, began to clutch at handrails to steady themselves, throwing their weight against the sway in an effort to stay upright. As they did so, the swinging began to get increasingly violent.
Ridsdill-Smith and the police working on crowd control looked at one another. In his mind, Ridsdill-Smith went back over all the calculations, all the safety assessments, all the wind-tunnel tests, even the giant hydraulic tank in Canada used to measure resistance to water. None of them had predicted anything like this. This was simply not supposed to be happening.
All his experience as an engineer told him that the bridge ought to be stable. But he must have seen an image of the great Tacoma Narrows suspension bridge in Washington State in 1940 as it shook itself to pieces, come flashing through his mind.
‘We asked ourselves, “Is it dangerous?” You could see that the movement was self-limiting. Beyond a certain point, it simply becomes impossible to get any more people on the bridge. As it gets fuller and fuller, people stop moving and the effect subsides, long before structural safety limits are reached. We knew it wouldn’t fall down, but suppose Granny takes a tumble and breaks a hip?’
The next day, Nicholas Serota lent the bridge his security staff from Tate Modern to limit the numbers crossing at any one time. But the wobble didn’t go away. The Millennium Bridge Trust hesitated for twenty-four hours before making the decision to close it altogether.
To see such a high-profile design closed down immediately after it had opened was bad enough for Foster. For Arup, the engineers who have made everything from the Sydney Opera House to the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank possible, it was a humiliation. They could build skyscrapers and nuclear power stations all over the world, but here, in their own backyard, they were conspicuously failing to make a simple footbridge stand still long enough for people to stroll across it.
What made their embarrassment so irresistible to rival engineers, who rushed in to make judgements about what had happened, was that they seemed to have brought it on themselves. The word was that they had allowed an architect, determined to make his mark on the bridge, push them into flouting the sensible limits of design. ‘Of course this bridge was going to wobble, just look at it,’ was the consensus. With its low-slung outriggers and its very flat profile, the ‘blade of light’ looked like no other bridge. Stray too far from tried-and-tested traditional designs and you’ll get into trouble, was the subtext of much of the debate.
Foster was in a Swiss meadow when he took the call from London telling him that something had gone badly wrong with the bridge. ‘It was a terrible moment,’ remembers Foster, still shaken by the experience.
At first he wavered about how to respond. Desperate to get the details of what was happening before making any comment, he came back to London immediately. An awkward confrontation with the press ensued in which he ill-advisedly answered their questions in a way that was interpreted as an attempt to shuffle away blame for the problems that the bridge experienced. The trouble, he seemed to be suggesting, stemmed not from a high-profile architect who had been ready to claim credit for the plaudits, but from the engineers whom he now described as the lead consultants. As soon as he had said it, Foster realised that it wasn’t the right thing to have implied, and there were plenty of people lining up to tell him so.
Arup began talking to the world’s footbridge experts in Japan and Germany. At the same time, they did urgent checks to see if the bridge had been built exactly as they had specified – it had – and then they looked yet again at their own calculations to see if there were any elementary mistakes in the numbers. There weren’t. ‘It’s not what is different about the bridge that caused the problem,’ Tony Fitzpatrick, Arup’s senior engineer leading the remedial project, claimed. ‘Every issue about the bridge that was innovative was properly researched and it worked perfectly. What hit us in the back of the head was that bit of the bridge that was the same as every other long-span bridge. We assumed it would work like other bridges have until now; that was the mistake, but there has to be a first time for everything.’
What Arup eventually discovered was a previously misunderstood phenomenon. Once the number of pedestrians on a bridge passes a critical mass, their footsteps start to make it move; the more they react to that movement to stay upright, the more the bridge shakes. It could potentially affect any pedestrian bridge over a given length. Fitzpatrick believed that there were at least seventy such bridges in Britain alone, with hundreds more around the world.
All bridges are liable to move. Their weight and structure keep them still to a certain extent, but get enough people walking across a bridge and all the natural damping is cancelled out; the next few footsteps will then set it wobbling violently. And it’s not a gradual effect. Arup found it was a case of all or nothing. ‘Put a thousand people on a bridge and it will seem to be OK. Put eleven hundred on and it starts to wobble,’ Fitzpatrick said.
Arup discovered a number of bridges which had suffered from the problem, and every one of them looked different. A high-level suspension bridge in Tokyo, completed in the 1980s, had to have a makeshift damping system retrofitted after its opening; in Canada they came across a hundred-year-old steel truss bridge that never moved a millimetre in its entire life, until the occasion of a firework display to celebrate its centenary attracted so many pedestrians that it began to wobble. Then there was the Pont de Solférino, a graceful arched footbridge across the Seine, which stayed closed after its opening, ostensibly because its surface was slippery. This, too, turned out to be the victim of wobbly-bridge syndrome. According to Fitzpatrick, ‘If the engineers involved with some of these cases had been open about their bridges as we are being, the problem would have been resolved long ago.’
The most encouraging find, from Arup and Foster’s point of view, was the footbridge linking the National Exhibition Centre in Birmingham to its neighbouring railway station. This was a design clearly untroubled by the least vestige of aesthetic ambition. Yet it, too, suffered from wobbly-bridge syndrome.
Why had none of these cases forewarned Arup? Fitzpatrick’s answer was that they were never reported to the people who write the codes that bridge designers must follow.
Who was really to blame? Following that ill-judged statement uttered by Foster to the mob of reporters besieging his office after the bridge closure, the various members of the design team went out of their way to be nice about each other. Foster now says with hindsight:
You can only use the word blame in a situation in which somebody says, ‘My God, we missed that code, or didn’t make that test which anybody else would have done.’ That’s not what happened here. If you look at the record, much more was done for this bridge than you would reasonably expect. Nobody could ever have anticipated that it would happen to the bridge. In a sense, it is a consequence of its popularity.
Fitzpatrick was clear that responsibility for the bridge was Arup’s. ‘Norman made it look more people-friendly; he made it more sensual than we would have done on our own, but the concept was an engineering one. It certainly wasn’t a case of Norman forcing us to make something work.’
After a £5 million financial settlement for the bridge, work started on the elimination of the wobble. It involved fitting a pair of X-shaped braces under each of the structural bays, along with thirty-seven viscous dampers (the kind of large shock absorbers you might find on a truck), and another fifty tuned mass dampers. These are heavy blocks that sit in baths of oil and are connected by springs to the structure. When the bridge starts to move, the blocks absorb the energy triggered by pedestrians and stop the wobble. It’s all been done deftly enough for the additions to look like part of the original design.
Designing Beijing’s new airport for the Olympics was to bring Foster + Partners face to face with an even clearer demonstration of the political aspects of architecture than that offered by the Reichstag or the British Museum.
Foster’s liaison on the project, Commander Chen, an official from the Chinese Civil Aviation Authority, told him when the result of the competition was announced at the end of 2003, ‘You have won two airports before in China that you did not get built. This is your third. To secure this one, there are many factors to deal with; mainly they are not to do with architecture.’ Which is to say that simply winning a competition in a political landscape as complex as that of contemporary China is unlikely by itself to be enough to realise a project.
To get to build in Beijing, Foster was going to have to call on high-level political support. Tony Blair wrote a helpful letter, neutralising any impulse on George Bush’s part to pick up the phone to call the Chinese premier in support of the American contender.
‘In any competition for an airport, the shortlist is narrowed to a small group,’ says Foster. ‘Out of them one scheme is the best, but you could build any of them and it would still be a good airport, otherwise the shortlist would not be like that.’
Once a competition result is announced, there is a whole wave of lobbying by unsuccessful participants. ‘The French are formidable as competitors. A trade delegation including the French president went to see the Chinese while we were talking about doing Shanghai airport. “There goes our airport,” we thought.’
And there was more than political manoeuvring to deal with. Mouzhan Majidi, who has taken a leading role building all four airports the practice has completed, was up against a preposterously abbreviated schedule. He had from November 2003 until January 2004 to deliver the contract drawings in time for work to start on site after a ground-breaking ceremony in March. The Chinese leadership were determined to have a new airport open in time for the Olympics in 2008, and this was the only way it could be delivered. But whereas the Olympic stadium itself was subject to constraints that led to the retractable roof being sacrificed in an economy drive after construction started, there were no compromises on the airport. Not even the avian flu panic was allowed to hinder its construction. The project took a heavy toll on Majidi. He got the call telling him the practice had won on holiday with his family and immediately afterwards he was summoned to a meeting in Beijing, brutally scheduled for Christmas Day to demonstrate how deadly serious the Chinese were about getting the airport built on time.
With thirty people in China, and the same number in London, Majidi established an office in Beijing, working with the Beijing Institute for Architecture and Planning, the Arup engineers and the NACO consultancy from the Netherlands. At the end of 2003, the existing airport hotel had been commandeered by the construction company that would build the new terminal building. While there were still guests negotiating the lobby, the ballroom was turned into a site office for the Foster team. Their neat ranks of workstations were overshadowed by the mirrored disco ball hanging from the ceiling that nobody had got round to taking down. Some of the guest bedrooms were in use as overflow offices for the squads of consultants planning the structure and managing the building process. Outside the ball-room was a digital clock, counting down the days to the opening of the games in 2008.
In 2008, flying into the completed airport in Beijing from Heathrow’s half-derelict Terminal Four meant confronting a whole series of preconceptions. The journey revealed the sometimes counterintuitive contrasts between the nature of public life in an advanced capitalist society and what, despite a massive economic transformation since the death of Mao, still declares itself to be a Marxist state guided by a socialist ideology. For all the neon glitter of the new cities on the Pearl River Delta, China is still fractured between extremes of poverty and absurd over-indulgence.
Yet it was not Beijing’s Capital International Airport that felt on the edge of chaos but Terminal Four in London, one of the world’s richest cities. Terminal Four has become a place where flight disruptions regularly leave thousands of delayed passengers camping outside the departure gates. Security checks organised like cattle pens turn catching a flight there into an ordeal, and maintenance teams fail to keep up with chewing gum-stained carpets.
Britain built Terminal Four in the 1980s, before China had embraced a capitalist economy, but in its architectural quality – the product, incidentally, of the same team that designed Baghdad International for Saddam Hussein – it reflects a stunted level of ambition. It looks as if it belongs to a culture that has lost any sense of self-belief.
Beijing’s Terminal Three is an airport built on a vast scale. In terms of sheer floor space, the building is as big as a city, conceived with what can only be described as grandeur. According to some accounts it is, by a considerable distance, the largest single building in the world. And that of course is the whole point of the exercise. For both its domestic audience, and for the world outside, creating the sense of Chinese achievement is crucial. It helps to still dissent at home, and to impress or even intimidate foreigners.
The start of 2008 saw Beijing in the midst of a tidal wave of construction, the result of its conscious transformation into what would unmistakably be the capital of a global superpower. And the airport was its front door.
The successive incarnations of Beijing’s airport provide a precise record of the transformation of China as a whole.
The first time that I saw it was in 1992, when its modest size, and its formal planning, reflected a time when air travel in China was still limited to the political elite. It had the flavour of a bus station from the Stalinist era: hard wooden benches, cement floors, and flickering black-and-white monitor screens that rarely worked lined the departure hall. Duty-free shopping was limited to a harshly neon-lit booth selling French brandy in bottles shaped like vintage cars. This was still a time when political tensions over the continuing recognition of Taiwan as the legitimate government of China meant that few Western airlines offered direct flights to Beijing. Decades of cultural isolation had reduced the city to just two real pieces of contemporary architecture: I.M. Pei’s Fragrance Hills Hotel and Denton Corker Marshall’s Australian Embassy, both built extremely slowly by construction brigades from the People’s Liberation Army, struggling to deal with any but the least sophisticated building techniques. The road from the airport was a two-lane black-top choked with trucks bringing winter vegetables into the city.
It’s a moment that seems as removed from today’s Beijing as the Middle Ages. Yet Terminal One still exists, embedded within the larger airport. After a cosmetic facelift, its sixteen gates have been turned over to domestic flights.
Terminal Two, ready by 1999, represented the Great Leap Forward. China was by this time engaging with the outside world, and was committed to modernising an archaic infrastructure. But it was still struggling to catch up with the outside world, rather than setting the pace for others to follow. It was much bigger that its predecessor, with acres of marble floors and murals representing national tourist attractions, but it felt like a provincial copy of a not very distinguished Western original. There was now a six-lane toll road to take you into town. In a city centre already sprouting skyscrapers, vast neighbourhoods of traditional hutong courtyard houses were being flattened. There were luxury hotels with Australian chefs and cigar bars, and the main streets were beginning to be encrusted with neon advertising. But the cycle-repair stalls eating up the pavement, and the knots of kitchen hands outside the cafés chopping up on trays slippery with poultry entrails, made it still an unmistakably Chinese city.
The preparations for the Olympics brought another level of ambition. Beijing saw the design and construction of an airport much larger than all the five terminals of Heathrow combined, designed to handle fifty-three million passengers per annum, in under four years. That’s rather less time than the lawyers spent arguing about whether or not to build Heathrow’s Terminal Five.
Beijing may have been planned to be the world’s largest and most advanced airport building, but as a construction site it looked like a medieval battlefield, conceived on the scale of epic cinema, rather than the sleek dunescape shown in the glittering computer renderings. Swarming warrior armies clustered around giant cranes, more than one hundred of them, ranged like ancient siege engines across a frontline almost two miles long. The dust swirling across the landscape sometimes made it impossible to count more than a few of them before they disappeared into the acrid haze. Touring the site in a Chinese-made Buick, it was hard at first as a spectator to grasp exactly what was going on. Gradually all the furious activity crystallised into a pattern that began to make some kind of sense. The banners flying from makeshift flagpoles sunk into the mud everywhere carried the names of individual work gangs, each with their own territory. The gangs, moving like disciplined cohorts of soldier ants as they navigated blindly but effectively around the obstacles littering the site, were identifiable by the colour of their helmets. Some were handling new deliveries. Others were preparing them for use. Others shifted barrowloads of nuts and bolts across the site or carried steel bars by hand, two at a time. In the foreground, groups of men in crumpled suits stacked heaps of reinforcing steel, ready to be bent into the hooks that would keep them securely in place when they were finally buried in concrete.
There were dumps of steel everywhere. So much steel, in fact, that it started to become only too clear how the Chinese hunger for the metal after the millennium had pushed up world prices to the point that British construction sites were forced to rediscover the art of building in concrete. There was enough steel there to explain why Australia had reopened iron-ore mines, why ship brokers had taken bulk carriers out of mothballs from their anchorages in the Falmouth estuary, and why manhole covers in Detroit were being stolen for their scrap value.
There were stacks of bicycles amid the welding stations and forests of concrete columns. Beyond them stood a gigantic concrete raft from which intricate tufts of reinforcing steel sprouted like wild grass. Far in the distance, more clusters of helmeted dots swarmed around craters sunk six floors into the ground. Huge white concrete-mixer trucks wheeled and turned in packs at the lip of the void, marshalled by men with whistles and batons, delivering loads in a continuous stream, day and night. In fact, despite appearances, the project had two main contractors, each starting at opposite ends of the site and working their way across it. The one who finished first would be required to go back and help the second to complete their part of the contract.
There were as many as 50,000 men on the site at its most labour-intensive moment. But when I was there in 2004, from my vantage point, a kind of diving board projecting over the edge of the 150-metre-wide channel dug from one end of the site to the other, I could focus my mind only on two of them. One was dressed in what looked like a second-hand military tunic; the other wore a suit that must once have been his holiday best, but was now covered in stains. Both had yellow hard hats, both wore tennis shoes. The shorter man had a satchel slung across his shoulder, and held a wrench.
At first I assumed that he was the more skilled of the two, and so the leader. They were perched on a scaffolding tower fifteen metres high, rising from the bottom of a trench cut deep into the mud.
The taller man, who looked barely out of his teens, stood with his legs wide apart, feet splayed, one hand fully outstretched, clinging to the nearest secure piece of vertical scaffolding. He had his safety harness wrapped around his waist, but its clip dangled uselessly behind him. Without looking down, he paused to steady himself for a moment, then, with a single effortless movement, used his free hand to swing up another heavy steel scaffolding pole and drop it into the clamp that would keep it secure. His slender body formed a big X as he defined the diagonals in the steel rectangle that framed him, holding the scaffolding in position just long enough for his partner to bolt it into place. As I watched, it became clear that he was the one taking the risks and making the decisions. The task complete, they rested for a minute. Then, without a word, they swung themselves along the scaffolding like tightrope walkers to repeat the entire manoeuvre with balletic grace and precision.
Working without their harnesses, it was a death-defying performance. I couldn’t take my eyes off them for fear that, if I did, one would drop the scaffolding pole and fall. They were earning around seven dollars each a day, not enough for the taxi ride back into town.
The site worked in three continuous shifts, seven days a week. Nothing stopped the cranes, the concrete mixers, the welders and the scaffolders. Not even the discovery of fossilised dinosaur bones that turned up in the mud ahead of the bulldozers one day, or a carved ancient stone, saved from the mechanical diggers and re-erected next to a cluster of huts.
The site was still working over the May Day holiday, when the rest of China shuts down for a week. The workers here stopped only for the Chinese New Year, when it got too cold for concrete to set properly. The site came to a standstill and the armies returned to their villages until the thaw came.
During the day they suffered in the dust storms and the summer heat. At night they worked under arc lights. They slept in ramshackle clusters of huts and green army tents in a series of shanty towns scattered around the site. The huts varied in size and shape. Some were made from plywood, with roofs of corrugated clear-plastic sheets, held down by bricks to stop them blowing away. There was no glass in the windows and nothing more elaborate than roofless latrine blocks for sanitation. These men were the legal, the semi-legal and the illegal migrant workers, drawn from China’s desperately poor hinterland in their millions by the prospect of jobs in construction and in the factories that the booming cities have to offer. One in every five of Shanghai’s population is an illegal migrant. Beijing is not far behind. These migrants are Chinese citizens with fewer rights in their nation’s capital than Colombians living illegally in California.
Everywhere you go in Beijing you can see clusters of spray-painted numbers scrawled over walls, on trees and gateposts, under flyovers and on streetlights. In Los Angeles or London they would be gang tags. But there is no graffiti in China. They are the mobile phone numbers of people looking for work.
Beijing is the capital of the world’s fastest-growing economy, provoking a titanic struggle between a totalitarian political system and the liberalisation that is the presumed product of its economic transformation. By some estimates, half the world’s annual production of concrete and one-third of its steel output was being consumed by China’s construction boom. The second ring road that until the 1980s marked the city limits has been followed by the building of a third, fourth and fifth rings. The sixth is under construction. The exploding millions of cars in the city are already enough to wipe out all the improvements in air quality achieved by the expulsion of heavy industry from Beijing’s centre. Cars move around disconnected clumps of newly completed towers. The city map looks like a dartboard, with the void of the Forbidden City as its empty bull’s-eye. And with the abruptness of a randomly aimed dart, entire new districts appear arbitrarily as if from nowhere.
A city that, until 1990, had no central business district, and little need of it, now has a cluster of glass towers that look like rejects from Singapore or Rotterdam. And these, in turn, are now being replaced and overshadowed by a new crop of taller, slicker towers, the product of the international caravan of travelling architects that has arrived in town to take part in this construction free-fire zone. Rem Koolhaas, Jacques Herzog, Zaha Hadid, Jean Nouvel and Will Alsop are all building or trying to build here. But it is Foster’s airport that is the gateway to this new China from the outside world, and the one that everybody must pass through.
At Heathrow, it took twenty years to design and build the airport’s fifth terminal. Building Beijing’s much larger Terminal Three in just four years is an astonishing feat. It is sometimes claimed that such an achievement is only possible in a society in which labour is endlessly available and cheap, and where trades unions and lawyers have no power. That is to say, a society not so unlike the one that in the nineteenth century used armies of migrant Irish labour to build the canals and railways of Britain’s Industrial Revolution. But, in fact, it is not that the building process is slower in Europe, construction itself takes much the same time, it is the management and the decision-making that drags on interminably in Britain.
By spring 2008, when my British Airways Boeing 747 pulled up on the crescent wing of stands furthest from the landside, there was no sign that the warrior armies had ever been here. There was still some dust – that is unavoidable in Beijing – but no mud, and no cranes. The site huts had gone, and in their place was the sharp outline of the new airport: more like a landscape than a single building, a kind of dunescape of glass and steel taking on the form of wind-drifted snow or sand. It was almost impossible to recognise the place as the construction site I had seen three years before. Only after I had negotiated the dazzling arrival hall in the outermost of the three wings of gates, gone through passport control, down into the transit rail system at the lowest level, shuttled off to the luggage hall, and finally emerged out into a humid Beijing afternoon thick with dust, did I experience a sudden flash of recognition. The curving crescent access road up to the main entrance was the same fragment of mud and steel that I had seen in 2004, now come to maturity.
Terminal Three is the largest version that has so far been realised of a new approach to airport terminal design that has a robot train track as its spine. At one end is the transfer station from the rapid transit line into town, and the first of three crescent-like wings that accommodate the gates. The first wing houses the check-in desks and the baggage hall. The additional gates that will one day give this airport a capacity larger than Heathrow are ranged around the two subsequent wings, although in 2008 only the first and the third were functioning.
If Norman Foster has had an impact even more marked than his transformation of London over the last two decades into a city of glass, it is on the design of the airport. The practice has built four so far – first Stansted, then Hong Kong’s Chep Lap Kok Airport, followed by the new third terminal at Beijing and Jordan’s new airport in Amman. Majidi’s first major project on joining Foster was to work on Stansted. Subsequently he moved to Hong Kong to lead the Chep Lap Kok team. Foster has created a new model for mass air travel. It is a model based on simplified architectural spaces characterised by vast internal volumes that are nevertheless suffused with daylight. Conventional airport terminals before Stansted put all the mechanical equipment on the roof, which demanded a heavy, solid structure. Foster’s idea was to put the equipment underneath the concourse, making it possible to build lightweight umbrella roof structures that allowed public spaces to be filled with light.
The first in the series, Stansted, was designed for what in those days was still a state-owned monopoly, the British Airports Authority, and run as a public service. Even as it was being completed, Stansted was turning into a revenue-generating retail operation with departure gates attached. In the 1990s, Stansted’s structural trees and its lucid diagram set a new standard for clarity. After the monuments of the 1950s, and the subsequent clutter of accretions that left so many airports encrusted with unsympathetic additions, Foster tried to recapture the simple directness of the early days of flying, when travellers were dropped off at the runway and climbed a set of steps into the aircraft. To soothe anxious passengers, struggling to navigate their way to the departure gate, the terminal building was conceived as a transparent box that could easily be understood without reading a single sign. A transit system connected the main terminal to remote stands in two satellite terminals.
Stansted celebrated its opening in 1990 with a black-tie dinner in the vast, empty and still pristine baggage hall. It was an event that felt like a throwback to the Victorian custom of inaugurating great feats of engineering with candlelit banquets attended by men in stove-pipe hats, sitting down in sewers and tunnels to eat pheasant on linen-covered tables. Foster got up to make a speech, and while paying tribute to the determination of the British Airports Authority to complete this massive investment in the future, he attacked the new managers who, even before the airport opened for passengers, were determined to clutter its beautifully clear open spaces with an obstacle course of retailing opportunities.
His fears have come true to an extent which even he would never have predicted. When it opened, the new terminal handled less than five million passengers a year. There was space for sculpture, and for a calm, measured movement from the pavement drop-off in the direction of the departure gate. It was a walk that hardly required any signs to tell you where to go. You moved towards daylight, and towards views of aircraft parked outside. It was briefly the most civilised way to leave and enter the UK. Foster’s architecture helped created the impression of a confident new Britain, investing in modern infrastructure.
It is none of those things now. With twenty-four million passengers a year, the airport is overwhelmed by people. The sculpture has been removed. There is no easy transition from the pavement; after the attack on Glasgow Airport by al-Qaeda sympathisers, the terminal entrance is a secure zone defended by concrete tank traps. And low-cost airlines that have started to treat their customers with contempt reduce the building to chaos.
The fate of Stansted is a reminder of the tension between architecture and art, and the fulfilment that one can bring when measured against the other. Architecture engages with the real issues of everyday life, it directly touches millions of lives, and yet the architect’s connection with his work is eroded with time to almost nothing. When a building has been in use long enough, whether it works well or not, the architecture mostly becomes invisible. To create an artwork is a more contained, more controlled, more controllable process than building. And in the end, it focuses on the ego of the artist, in a way that architecture never can.
In Hong Kong, Foster’s Chep Lap Kok refined the original Stansted concept, setting a precedent for Beijing. In most airports, because they cover such large spaces, the roof is the primary architectural element. Stansted is based on a square grid. Hong Kong brings a more refined series of gentle curved pillow-like forms.
Beijing is the most refined of all, with the roof structure so slender and so attenuated that it is almost at the point of disappearing altogether. It is supported on a restricted number of tapering concrete columns, pylons really, that have a flavour of the huge roof that Foster once proposed building over the Reichstag in Berlin. Inside the terminal the columns are so few and far between that they avoid imposing any kind of structural pattern on the huge space. There is a single external row, which is painted imperial red, in evocation of traditional Chinese colour schemes, an idea that first occurred to Foster for the external structure of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, though it ended up being dropped in favour of a more neutral, and international, grey.
The gentle curves of the over-sailing roof are formed by a steel open grid, some elements of which have been peeled back to open up roof-lights to allow in sparkling flashes of daylight while the glass walls reveal the ranks of aircraft outside. It’s a form which some, in another overtly Chinese metaphor, have interpreted as the scales of a dragon.
These are vast, open interiors, elegantly conceived, and a huge technical step forward, along with the Olympic stadium, and the Central China TV building, from anything that China has done before. But of course, China is still China. As you glide along the track of the robot train, you pass the still not completed central pavilion where the gates have yet to come into use, and you can glimpse workers squatting in the empty interiors in their olive drab uniforms, a sharp reminder of the other China. And as you negotiate the spacious and efficiently run departure hall, the elegance of the architecture is occasionally threatened by the profusion of shops and cafés. When the roof is as delicate as this, the kitsch detritus of airport clutter becomes intrusive, although in Bejing there is the scale that Stansted lacks to deal with it.
This is the highly symbolic gateway not only to Beijing, but also to the new China. It represents a country that has undergone change at a pace so rapid that it threatens to become dizzying. The airport shows what China can do at a moment when it is bidding to become as much of a cultural and political force as it is an industrial one. Its next leap forward will come when it will have architects of its own who can design a project like this. Throughout the process, Foster was well aware that in part he had been hired to pass on skills and expertise to his Chinese collaborators.
In contrast to his experiences in Berlin with Chancellor Kohl, Foster had no direct dealings with the party leadership. But he has no doubt that the Chinese premier, Wen Jiabao, took a close personal interest in the project.
In China you never quite know who is taking the decisions. Commander Chen from the Civil Aviation Authority was the highest up we could go in terms of talking to the client. It was clear that he had people that he reported to, but you could only guess who they were. But there was a strong feeling that if the Premier paid a visit to the airport, then if there was a problem with a colour, for example, Commander Chen would bring it up after an elapse of a little time. I had the idea of using a palette of traditional colours, from imperial red to gold, and with the many variations between. And it was after one of those high-level visits that Commander Chen came to us, and said, ‘Can’t the roof pick up the colour of the Forbidden City?’ The design team went and had another close look at the Forbidden City, to try to find a colour that could convey the impact of the many different tones of the terracotta roof tiles used there.
The response was an attempt to create an airport that is at the same time clearly part of the modern world but equally clearly rooted in modern China.
China is a difficult place for a Western architect to make money: fee scales are much lower than in the West, and the architect is expected to do more. And when fees are based on a percentage of construction costs, low-wage Chinese labour makes the contract sum much smaller than it would be in Europe or America. In fact, Foster says that the Beijing job ended up leaving the firm out of pocket. The Chinese had capped the fee and placed a limit on the architect’s involvement. When the paid consultancy came to an end, so did the fees. Foster says that he could not walk away from the project that represented so much in terms of his own ambitions. He chose to stay on and help complete the airport. ‘We were welcome to stay, and contribute, but in terms of finance, that was it. We elected to stay, because we shared our clients’ intent to make the airport the best that they could, and that decision was very well received.’ After the Olympics were over, Foster was invited back to Beijing to receive a friendship award in the Great Hall of the People, China’s highest decoration for foreigners.
It took time for Foster to make an impact in China. Before the Bejing airport there was only a sleek office tower on the Shanghai waterfront, and a string of unbuilt designs, including airports in Guangzhou and Shanghai. Now there is a range of new settlements that are called Eco cities in China, and a scheme in Bejing, in the Caochangdi cultural district. Foster + Partners is building a complex of exhibition spaces and studios on a site between Ai Wei Wei’s own studio, and the Three Shadows Centre, established by the photographers RongRong and inri. In Hong Kong he has a continuing relationship with the bank, and the airport. Subsequently there were the plans for the Kowloon cultural district, and there is work in Malaysia and Vietnam. But in the two construction booms of the past decade, China and Russia, Foster has had a higher profile in Russia, even if little of his work has been realised there.
Norman Foster has had a soft spot for Russia ever since he first went with David Nelson in 1990 in the last days of the Soviet Union. He was the guest of Energiya, Russia’s newly privatised space agency. They took him to Space City, at Baikonur, to watch the first fare-paying space tourist, a Japanese television reporter named Toyohiro Akiyama, blast off for a week on the Mir space station. Energiya wanted Foster to help them modernise themselves for an uncertain future. In the event, that project failed to materialise, but Foster was fascinated by what he saw in Space City. He went to the museum of the cosmonauts, which he likens to the shrine for a new religion, full of relics and sacred memorabilia that made them look like the martyrs of the early Christian Church.
In Foster’s eyes, the Soviet cosmonauts were the first environmentalists. ‘They took up the cause of the damage done to the inland lakes of Russia because of what they could see from space. It was their photographs of planet Earth as a serene, beautiful, blue-green globe, caught in the midst of the blackness of space, that triggered the whole earth movement.’
He was fascinated and awed by what he saw of the training regime for the cosmonauts, who had to submit to vast centrifugal machines that pushed them to the limits of human endurance, and to judge by the casualties, maybe sometimes beyond them.
But most of all, he was struck by the difference between the American and the Soviet attitude to space. The Americans were visitors, he suggests. ‘The Soviet cosmonauts inhabited space, they truly colonised it, they lived there seven or twenty-four days at a time.’
On the way back from Baikonur he stayed in the Rossiya Hotel, the vast Brezhnev-era hotel under the Kremlin’s walls that has been demolished as part of a massive, now-stalled move to remodel the heart of the Russian capital on which he has worked to produce a coherent master plan. He was in Moscow long enough on that first trip to wander through the GUM department store off Red Square. Now, it is a glossy shopping mall dedicated to conspicuous consumption, but in those days it was semi-derelict, its shelves bare of even the simplest goods. Foster remembers the pathos of watching an elderly man with a wad of greasy banknotes lining up patiently to buy a pathetically small toy as a Christmas gift.
By the time that he went back to Russia, Foster was already working on his first project in Kazakhstan – the glass pyramid of the Palace of Peace and Reconciliation. And Russia had emerged from its first post-Soviet economic crisis. The energy boom had made a few Russians extremely rich, triggering a wave of reconstruction. In 2004 Foster went to St Petersburg to see Zaha Hadid collect her Pritzker Prize in the Hermitage, and he came away determined to expand the practice by working in Russia and other new areas.
It was in St Petersburg that he was introduced to Shalva Chigirinsky, the controversial businessman who was to be one of his routes into the volatile Russian property market. Chigirinsky encouraged Foster to take part in an international competition for the renovation of New Holland, formerly a naval base built for the Imperial Russian Fleet in the heart of St Petersburg, as a cultural centre, mixing the careful restoration of the historic areas with auditoria, galleries and a striking open-air theatre. Foster was judged the winner after a public presentation.
More commissions followed. In 2006, Chigirinsky beat two other bidders in a tender to Moscow City Council to redevelop the sprawling site of the 1,000-bed Rossiya Hotel. Foster was asked to work on a master plan that proposed concert halls, galleries, public spaces, retail and residential space, totalling a massive 400,000 square metres. It was the kind of commission that carried both huge risks and even more potential. Russia still lacks transparency in business and clarity about property rights. It’s a culture in which business and politics are inextricable. But replanning the Rossiya site was also the chance to give Moscow’s most historic sites a new setting, and to create a new civic heart for the city.
Foster’s role in the reshaping of Moscow was highlighted when he was the subject of an exhibition in the Pushkin Museum in 2006, the product of a meeting some years earlier with Irina Antonova, the Pushkin’s director since 1962. Foster later took part in a state-sponsored competition to create a much larger Pushkin Museum due to be completed in time for the centenary of its foundation in 2012. Pride of place in the exhibition went to a huge model of the 600-metre-high Rossiya tower, yet another design by Foster for Chigirinsky’s company, STT. It was conceived as a vertical megastructure that would be the tallest skyscraper in Russia, a city in a single building, with energy-harvesting capacity and a direct connection to the Moscow metro – in short, the realisation of Foster’s speculative studies for an ultra-tall tower. An entire wall of the Pushkin was devoted to a massive, seemingly life-size photographic blow-up of the Foster studio in Battersea with its view out over the Thames.
Interviewed during the course of the exhibition, Chigirinsky told the Moscow News he had chosen to work with Foster because ‘a new kind of consumer is emerging in Russia. People here want to know the world’s state of the art, and go one better. In the past, tastes were kitschy, in the “I want more gilt on that ceiling” style. But over the years, people not only got richer, their taste also evolved.’
By the end of 2008, however, the credit crunch put a stop to any speculative project that depended on bank finance. Chigirinsky’s plans to build with Foster were no exception, and came crashing to a sickening stop when the Georgian pulled out of the $3 billion Crystal City project, unable to raise the capital. The New Holland project had also come to a standstill. Legal wranglings stalled the old Rossiya Hotel site when Morab, one of the unsuccessful bidders, went to court to contest the tender process, claiming that Chigirinsky had insider knowledge of the deal. Chigirinsky successfully appealed when the decision went against him. Morab appealed in turn, and won, leading to a hiatus. In 2009, the city of Moscow was manoeuvring to take over the project. Work had already stopped on the Rossiya tower. ‘Say thanks to Alan Greenspan and George Bush,’ said Chigirinsky, blaming the credit crunch.
Foster travelled to Moscow after his first trip to St Petersburg and met the mayor, Yuri Luzhkov. Some time later, he was introduced to Luzhkov’s wife, Yelena Baturina, in Chigirinsky’s office. Baturina was the first Russian female billionaire. She had worked in a factory before studying at the Moscow Institute of Management, then in the last days of the Soviet Union went to Mosgorispolkom, part of the Moscow local government, where she met Luzhkov, who went on to become the mayor in the Yeltsin years. Baturina has come in for considerable criticism for the way in which her ties with Moscow’s mayor have been put to work to help her business grow.
Foster was to find himself caught up unwittingly in one of Baturina’s more controversial development proposals, a massive cultural and residential complex in the centre of Moscow, known as the Golden Orange, which provoked a string of disputes that were exacerbated by Russia’s fluid understanding of property rights. Chigirinsky asked Foster as a favour to assess the feasibility of a hypothetical structure conceived by Baturina and a Russian architect, and then to see how it might be developed on a specific site. The site eventually targeted by Baturina stood very close to Zurab Tsereteli’s bizarre monument to Peter the Great, a giant bronze representation of a three-masted sailing ship, with a huge figure standing on deck, installed thanks to the intervention of her husband the mayor. The site is currently occupied by the Central House of Artists, built in the Brezhnev era, and as unpopular as buildings from the 1970s are in Britain. Nevertheless it is a base for many of Moscow’s artists, and it houses the Tretyakov Gallery, which boasts the finest collection of constructivist art in the world. Alongside a garden full of statuary commemorating the fallen monsters of Stalin’s Russia, such as Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of the KGB, dethroned from their original sites, and collected together here as a kind of monumental graveyard, are rooms that house Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square, and Composition VII by Vasily Kandinsky.
Baturina’s plan was to accommodate the gallery within her development, meeting the cost with a complex of luxury apartments and five-star hotels. What interested Foster was not the architecture, but the prospect of using the project as a catalyst to regenerate a string of parks running along the river, currently fragmented by roads, in the manner of Olmsted’s Central Park. But Baturina wasn’t convinced by the idea, and Foster and his team have distanced themselves from the design, which now takes the form of a number of multi-storey spheres, almost in the neo-Classical manner of Étienne Boullée, but sliced open to reveal segments, and connected together with a spiralling twist of peel.
At the Venice architecture Biennale in 2008, the young Moscow architect Boris Bernaskoni was allocated space in the Italian pavilion by the American director, Aaron Betsky for an installation that mounted an acid critique of the Golden Orange project. Bernaskoni flyposted the walls of the gallery with a series of posters. Some rendered Foster’s face in a Warhol-style portrait looming over the Moscow skyline. They were interspersed with a particularly phallic banana erupting from the Kremlin walls. On a table in the corner was a collection of letters to President Putin, calling on him to stop Baturina’s project. If the site had to be redeveloped, then there should be a less flamboyant, and less ostentatious way to do it. The credit crunch put an end to the project for the foreseeable future.
In fact, of all Foster’s work in Russia, the project most likely to be realised in the near future is his careful restructuring of the Pushkin Museum. When Putin was succeeded as Russian president by Medvedev, the government committed the funds for the project.
Foster’s work in Russia, and the closely related projects in the former Soviet republic of Kazakhstan, fall into two types. There are sober attempts at contextualism, such as New Holland where a mixed cultural and commercial development is for the most part safely buttoned up behind walls built by Peter the Great, or the effort on the site of the Rossiya to create a setting in the grand manner for the Kremlin that gives a sense of a monumental city fabric in Hausmannian mode. And then there are the wild new projects that aspire to create self-conscious originality and a sense of spectacle: the half-peeled Golden Orange and the Crystal City typify this tendency. Foster has another project under way in this vein: the Khan Shatyry entertainment centre, a 200-metre-high tent, designed to give Nazarbayev’s new capital of Astana a social hub with sheltered public spaces in a climate that sees temperatures plummet to thirty degrees below zero. Both the Crystal City and Khan Shatyry can be interpreted as inspired by Buckminster Fuller’s dome over Manhattan: utopian visions of a bubble of urbanity in the midst of a hostile climate, though in the form of a vast circus tent rather than a minimalist bubble of air.