The choices that an architect makes about the houses in which he lives and the places in which he works are rarely entirely unselfconscious. More likely they are shaped at least in part by the urge to reflect their occupant’s self-image.
Like most British architects making their way in the 1960s Norman Foster spent the early days of his career in a sequence of nineteenth-century buildings. But he was already thinking about what he would build for himself when he got the chance. He bought a plot of land in a mews street in Hampstead, and planned a house for it that summed up everything that he wanted to say about architecture. It would have been a tribute to the Maison de Verre in Paris, the icon of the modern movement designed by Pierre Charreau and Bernard Bijvoet in celebration of industrial mechanisms, glass bricks and steel beams. This memory of the avant garde of the 1920s was blended with a flavour of the house that Charles and Ray Eames designed for themselves in Santa Monica in the 1940s, and given a sharp new twist for the 1970s. Like the Maison de Verre, every piece of the Foster house would have been purpose made. Like Charreau, who was fascinated by pivoting mechanical screens and partitions and used them to transform the interior of the Maison de Verre, Foster treated furniture as a kit of interchangeable parts. Like the Eames house, Foster’s project was conceived as a kind of proving ground, putting new ideas to the test in laboratory conditions before adapting them for everyday use. The house would have had a single main volume, with a five-metre-high ceiling, allowing for mezzanine levels. The walls would be made from blocks of glass, and the steel structure, punched full of circular holes, would be left on show. Foster’s house had the kind of kinship to the Bean Hill housing estate, built by the practice in Milton Keynes at the same time, that a Ferrari has to a Fiat. Between 1978 and 1979, working with the engineer Tony Hunt, Foster built two full-size prototypes of a single bay of the structure, one in steel and the second using aluminium, in the grounds of his weekend home at Compton Bassett.
Foster’s one-off house in Hampstead was never built. All that remains is a set of drawings of the interior that show a range of specially designed furniture prefiguring the tables later made for the Foster office.
Bean Hill, with its flat roofs and corrugated black metal skin that looked a lot like the back of a Citroën van, did. Single-storey houses offered the most adaptable layouts and extra outdoor living space. Generously proportioned though the houses were, with courtyard gardens, Bean Hill was not a success. It is still standing, but has been altered out of all recognition. The tenants could not afford their heating bills, and complained about both the industrial image of the houses and the lack of insulation. The flat roofs began to leak and were replaced with sloping ones, a move that might be read as standing for a symbolic triumph of tradition over architectural taste that could have been orchestrated by the Prince of Wales himself.
The project was planned at a moment of rampant inflation, and in an area of Britain suffering a shortage of skilled builders. Foster explored simplified construction techniques and a prefabricated timber frame. During the planning stage, Foster’s team compared the cost with an off-the-shelf system used for cowsheds, an idea that would not have gone down well with the occupants, had they known.
Foster and Buckminster Fuller worked together on a plan for a solar-powered house taking the form of a dome within a dome, so as to create a highly insulated interior. They were planning to build one each. One would have been at Compton Bassett, the other for Fuller and his wife, Anne, in Los Angeles. Fuller continued to dream of building it even after Anne became too ill to think of moving.
The first home that Foster actually built for himself was an apartment on the roof of his offices in Battersea. It had a spectacular view over the Thames, and a heroic scale. On one pristine white wall, plastered twice over to meet Foster’s exacting specifications, Richard Long made an artwork, pasting Thames mud in big streaking arcs across the highly polished plaster. It was a demonstration of Foster’s growing interest in contemporary art, both in his personal life, and in his work. Foster’s continuing relationship with Long included a commission for the Médiathèque in Nîmes and culminated in a monumental work in the Hearst building in Manhattan.
Over the years, he has been close to many artists. Anthony Caro was a neighbour in Hampstead. Brian Clarke, who made Foster’s work into the subject matter of some of his paintings and contributed stained glass to the Palace of Peace in Astana, is a long-term friend. Anish Kapoor was involved in the Ground Zero competition and the British Museum. Foster is also fascinated by the work of Richard Serra. In person, both men have a similar kind of intensity, they understand how to see space, and movement in that space, before it exists.
Foster has thought hard about the relationship between architecture and art. Memorably, he once suggested that the role of public art in contemporary architecture had been reduced to an attempt to put lipstick on a gorilla. Perhaps because they do not speak quite the same language as architects, he is comfortable with artists in a way that he is not always with other architects. But to be an architect is to accept that while your work will transform everyday life, by becoming its background, it is art that will be its foreground. And it is art that serves to define our culture, more than architecture.
Foster followed the Battersea flat with a house in the South of France in pristine white steel and glass. Then in 2000 came an abrupt change. He designed a three-storey apartment building in St Moritz, and acquired one of the flats for his own use. Rather than eat up more precious land in the Engadine, he tried to find a higher-density solution, one that would still give him the qualities of a country home but within a built-up area and suggest ways in which sprawl might be limited on the tightly defined edge of a town. Foster used the traditional materials and craft techniques of the area, not because of local planning controls, but because he had become as fascinated by these skills as he was intrigued by the apparently artlessly engaging quality of the engineering vernacular of the aircraft industry.
The Chesa Futura was one of the first projects that Foster realised after he abandoned his unflinching commitment to rectilinear geometry, and for many it was at first hard to identify it as having come from his studio. From the outside, the Chesa Futura looks like a wooden cloud hoisted up on fat legs, faced with 250,000 wooden shingles. These had been cut by hand, one by one, by a local craftsman in his seventies from one hundred specially selected larch trees. By choosing a material that grew and could be processed so close to the site, the energy needed to utilise it was of course reduced to a minimum.
Shingles cover the walls and roof in a seamless envelope. And if you walk beneath the building, you discover that it has a shingle underbelly too. The parking spaces, storage, and mechanical equipment are concealed underground.
All of the homes Foster built were carefully designed to suggest something very specific about the kind of architect that he wanted to be at various points in his life. But it is his studios that have provided a more direct commentary on his evolving approach to architecture. Setting aside the various spaces that he has made for himself in which to work at home, he has had five studios in the course of his career.
When Foster started talking to IBM’s British management in 1969 about building a temporary headquarters for them in Cosham, he knew that his flat in Hampstead was not the best place from which to convince a multinational to hire him. He badly needed somewhere more impressive, and much more professional-looking, even if the practice couldn’t afford it yet. Achieving that kind of transformation in perceptions in one form or another is the task that architects have always been asked to take on for their clients.
Tony Hunt, Foster’s structural engineer since the Team Four years, had just moved into Bedford Street in Covent Garden. In those days it was still a daringly exotic address. That was what made it exactly the right kind of place for an architect building inflatable structures for start-up computer companies as Foster had been. Perhaps it also gave IBM the sense that, while Foster was certainly businesslike, he was still in touch with the contemporary world. The Middle Earth, the hippie club in which the Incredible String Band and Pink Floyd had started their careers, was just around the corner in a King Street cellar. In the mornings, the pavements were stacked high with orange boxes from the market.
Foster asked Hunt if he could borrow a couple of rooms for long enough to convince IBM that he was serious. If he didn’t get the job, he could always go back to Hampstead. Zeev Aram, the most cerebral furniture store owner in Britain, lent some suitably impressive office furniture and the kind of boardroom table with which to make a statement. Foster hurriedly put up the grey and black RIBA approved architect’s name board of the time on the street door, and hung a work of art by Mark Vaux in the reception room.
IBM was impressed enough by what they saw and heard to hire him, and as a result, Foster Associates was able to afford to stay in Covent Garden. The next move came in 1972 when Foster went to Fitzroy Street, just below the Post Office Tower. This time the company created a little slice of Willis Faber on the ground floor of a faceless office building.
Like Willis Faber, the Fitzroy Street office had a black glass front that gave nothing away about what was going on inside, at least not until after dark when the lights came on. Those in the know could spot the Foster office simply from a glimpse of the neoprene-jointed glass façade and the studded rubber plinth on which it sat. For those who weren’t, there was a neon sign to spell out the practice’s name in letters six inches high. In fact neon had become something of a signature for Foster. He used it for the Olsen Line’s Regent Street showroom, and for the Orange Hand store in Hampstead. Inside the office there were bulkhead doors with radiussed corners that made you feel as if you were inside a submarine, a home-made tribute to the steel fabricated by Jean Prouvé. Simply to be seen working in an open-plan office in those days was understood as an act of bravado. It involved pulling down partition walls and dumping all the usual desks and filing cabinets to make room for what were just beginning to be called workstations. Despite Foster’s reputation for seeing the world in neutral shades of grey, a lot of Fitzroy Street was painted acid yellow and had mint green carpets, reminders of the searing colours that he had used for the interiors of Willis Faber.
An open-plan office may no longer have much to say about the world of work that is new, but when letters were being hammered out by secretaries in typing pools on IBM golfball electric typewriters that still seemed like a technological breakthrough, at a time when managers still fought to get corner offices, it was a confrontationally radical stance. Foster wanted to suggest that architecture was more about objective scientific calculation than it was about emotion and sculpture. It was as if the Calvinism of Serge Chermayeff, his tutor from his Yale days, had eclipsed everything that he had learned from Paul Rudolph. Foster made his office look as businesslike as possible. But there was always something else, something more unconventional under the apparent calm of the high-gloss corporate surface.
Reyner Banham described Fitzroy Street as an office in which ‘the boss’s racing bike hung on one wall, and the male staff came complete with the moustache du jour’. Photographs of the period show Foster’s employees dressed like peacocks in their floral-print shirts with huge collars, their tank tops and their flared trousers. And Birkin Haward, who was responsible for some of the most memorable drawings coming out of the office at the time, was always slipping in counter-cultural vignettes in the shape of hot-air balloons and hippies.
It was here that Foster and Partners worked on one of the most impressive of their unbuilt projects. It was for London Transport’s redevelopment of the Hammersmith Broadway tube station and bus garage, with a new transport interchange, topped by a ring of offices and shops enclosing a covered public space.
Fitzroy Street was the office in which the team of fifteen people who had won the competition to design the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank celebrated their victory in November 1979. After the champagne, a delegation from the American manufacturer bidding to make the bank’s skin began to look a little restless; it turned out they were waiting to be ushered into the main building, assuming that they had got no further than the lobby.
Foster’s next office was in Great Portland Street, and it paraphrased the Sainsbury Centre. The office filled the ground floor and basement of a stone-faced Victorian block with high ceilings, and a clear glass street-front, veiled by white perforated aluminium louvres. The louvres flooded the interior with carefully filtered light, but when they were closed, they made it impossible to make out exactly what was going on inside, night or day. There were automatic sliding glass entrance doors, and a raised perforated grey metal floor, the kind of thing that in those days you only saw in sterile clean rooms built for mainframe computers that were the size of a house. The floor had a hollow mechanical ring as you walked across the office. It felt like negotiating the cargo bay of a Boeing.
By the door there was a specially made table, with lily-pad feet, like a lunar lander, and a gunmetal-finished tubular steel structure that had its roots in the work done on the unbuilt Hampstead house. Years later the Italian furniture company, Tecno, turned the table into a commercial product, as part of an office furniture system. The system never caught on, but the table did succeed in becoming part of the very limited number of pieces of furniture that, like Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona chair or an Eames lounger, can serve to define the tastes of their owners. Most of the time the Great Portland Street version of the table had a large model of Buckminster Fuller’s solar house sitting on top of it.
Foster staff who made the transition from Fitzroy Street remember Great Portland Street with affection. At Fitzroy Street, Spencer de Grey recalls office lunches art directed with the same precision applied to the façade of a building. For John Small, who leads Foster + Partners industrial designers, Great Portland Street had lighting that made it feel like a pool hall. There were inspirational images of Prouvé, Eiffel and Fuller on the walls, and architects smoked at their drawing boards in an effort to get the ink to dry faster.
Almost the entire Foster team moved to Hong Kong, where the satellite office building the bank tower eventually grew to more than one hundred people. Spencer de Grey, David Nelson, Graham Philips, Roy Fleetwood and Ken Shuttleworth, Foster’s principal lieutenants at the time, all moved to Asia. The exodus was a stark reflection of what the bank represented for the practice. They were building a huge and extraordinarily demanding project on the far side of the world from Great Portland Street. It was a complex and difficult process, and one that stretched the Foster team to their limits. And at the time there was nothing in London to match the scale of the job. Foster was torn between putting everything he had into the bank, and keeping out of the day-to-day running of the Hong Kong project so that he could concentrate on the next step. The conventional thing to do at the time would have been to move continents. Jorn Utzon shifted his family from Denmark to Sydney to build the Opera House. Richard Rogers lived at least part of the time in Paris to build the Pompidou Centre. But as might be expected from an architect who was already thinking two moves ahead even when he was still a student, Foster chose to stay in London with a rump of his staff, down at some points to a dozen people, while he worried about what the firm would be doing when the Hong Kong project came to an end.
‘At the time we couldn’t understand why he didn’t move to Hong Kong with us,’ says David Nelson. ‘We had to keep briefing him on what had happened between visits, but in retrospect he was absolutely right.’ What Foster always had in mind was the long-term future. When the bank was finished he did not want to find himself back where he had been before he won the Hong Kong competition.
Foster took to descending on the bank team at unpredictable intervals, insisting on changes when he decided that things had taken a wrong turn, while trying to pin down another big commission to secure the future of the office. To fight perpetual jet-lag, he took up running. It was a solitary activity that he used to find time by himself to think, and then as you might expect from a man always driven to excel at everything, it spilled over into competitive marathon races.
Having to deal with the claim that the Hong Kong bank was the most expensive building that the world had ever seen – an assertion that was as hard to prove as it was to disprove – did not help to make Foster more employable. There was a long series of projects such as the BBC Radio headquarters in Portland Place in London, or even more disappointingly for Foster, the aborted German National Athletics Stadium in Frankfurt, that dispiritingly came to nothing. Finally, in 1981, Foster won the commission for a new terminal at Stansted Airport, and a short time later Spencer de Grey came back from Hong Kong to work on the project.
The Foster office bought its first computer while it was still in Great Portland Street, but hardly any of the architects – who sat at their drawing boards, lit by desk lights with red shades, working in ink on paper drawing the four-metre-long cross-sections for the BBC building – had any idea how to use it. Computers were not yet for the creative. David Nelson describes the Foster office that built the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank as divided between the heavy boots, among which number he saw himself, and the floppy hats. The computer, for a time, introduced a third category: the digitally literate.
Gordon Graham, the chain-smoking and always imperturbably urbane former president of the Royal Institute of British Architects, joined the office after he had helped the bank select Foster Associates. Foster then went on to win commissions to build the Renault centre in Swindon in 1980 and the Médiathèque in Nîmes in 1984. Renault, a vivid yellow cluster of steel umbrellas, was built very quickly, but Nîmes ended up taking almost a decade to finish as the city struggled to find the money to keep construction going. It was so slow that the fees it brought in were hardly enough to keep the office in London afloat. Stansted Airport was moving even more slowly as it ground its way through the intricate coils of the kind of public inquiry demanded by the British planning system.
It was Foster’s drawing skills, pitted against formidable competition from Frank Gehry and Jean Nouvel, along with the support of James Stirling, who was on the jury, that won him the Médiathèque project, an art-gallery-cum-library across the street from Nîmes’ miraculously well-preserved Roman monument, the Maison Carrée. Martin Francis remembers Gordon Graham using a stopwatch to time Foster in his hotel room while he practised doing a complete set of drawings that showed structure, circulation, and spatial sequences, seemingly instantly. It was an apparently off-the-cuff feat that, when he repeated it the next day, was enough to impress the mayor of Nîmes who was setting out on an ambitious plan to bring the world’s most high-profile architects to work in the city. What makes the Médiathèque significant in understanding Foster’s work is that it marked a point of transition. Before he built it, rightly or wrongly, he was known as a man with a ruthless approach to history and context. Nîmes was a project in which history and context were extraordinarily important, and which helped shape the way that he worked at the Royal Academy’s Sackler Gallery, the British Museum’s Great Court, and Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts.
Foster himself was becoming an increasingly visible figure, which helped to ensure that the office did not turn into an anonymous set of initials, in the way that many architectural practices of a similar size were moving. Foster was signed up to endorse Rolex watches in a series of press advertisements. He was photographed for the pages of Vanity Fair, in the guise of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, when the magazine updated the famous photograph of the architects’ Beaux-Arts Ball of 1931 which William van Allen attended dressed as the Chrysler Building. He was even the inspiration for the protagonist of Philip Kerr’s thriller, Gridiron, about an architect who designs a building that becomes self-aware enough to start killing off its occupants. And Foster found himself moving out of the professional ghetto to work on a series of fashion-conscious projects that made contemporary architecture a part of popular culture in Britain in a way that it had not been for many years. When Katharine Hamnett was at the height of her fame after being photographed with Margaret Thatcher in her political T-shirt dress, she asked Foster to design her first shop for her. There was a project with Doug Tompkins, founder of the Esprit fashion chain. For Joseph Ettedgui he built an elegant flagship store on Sloane Street – subsequently destroyed – that reflected some of the thinking from the Hampstead house.
Finally the office migrated to Battersea, where the Fosters built a complex of their own, mixing flats, offices and workshops.
Foster was at lunch in Chelsea, one day in 1986, and from the restaurant window he and Wendy noticed the empty site across the river, sandwiched between a bus garage and a derelict creek. They went over to take a look, and discussed doing a development on their own account, that would give them an office and also an apartment in the residential development that they planned to put on top of it.
The studio occupies the lower three floors of Riverside. Reversing the pattern established by Paul Rudolph in New Haven, the apartment is four floors above the office. Foster’s ambition at Battersea was to create a mixed-use development, putting apartments on top of offices, all with spectacular views of the river.
The main Foster office is a single space on a vast scale. The architects work at pristine benches positioned at regular intervals at right angles to the window wall overlooking the river. One cartoonist represented the arrangement as the slave deck of a trireme. When the office first moved in, the only computers were for the payroll and for the CAD specialists. For the rest of the office, there were drawing boards with parallel-motion rulers, ink, paper and pencils. There is no apparent hierarchy, even if Foster himself spends most of his time at the extreme east end of the studio, closest to the window.
Battersea reflects Foster at his smoothest. Having outgrown high tech, he made an office that looked like the kind of place that could plausibly build a parliament for Germany, or design a superyacht, or a private aircraft. Clients on their way in rise up a sequence of granite steps sweeping directly from the pavement into the studio on the piano nobile above. Foster conceived of it as a workshop in which the client comes to participate in the process of design, rather than to be hidden away in a conference room as the passive audience for a presentation. There are no waiting rooms, no reception seating – an absence which sometimes leaves visitors looking a little puzzled about where to sit or stand as they wait to be invited in.
Wendy Foster did not live to see the studio completed in 1990. She died while building was still going on, leaving Foster with their two sons, by this time in their twenties, and two more adopted children. Shortly before she became ill, Norman and Wendy had followed their friends Richard and Ruthie Rogers in going to America to adopt a child: Jay Foster. Ti, their oldest son, had already persuaded them that an American friend, Steve Abramowitz, whose single parent father had recently died, needed the kind of a stable family home that they could offer. The Fosters immediately adopted him in all but name too.
It could not have been anything but an emotionally turbulent time. Foster had to come to terms with the gaps in both his professional life, in which Wendy had once played such a vital part, and his personal life.
After the grief faded, there were a number of girlfriends. His relationship with Anna Ford got him into the gossip columns for a while, and then came a second marriage to Sabiha Knight in 1991, dissolved less than five years later.
In volume one of the Foster Complete Works series, published in 1990, shortly after his first wife’s death, there is a succinct account of the practice’s architectural convictions and its principles. It is written by Norman Foster, and in it he movingly remembers that he had not expected to find himself writing what had originally been planned as a text by Wendy. Before she became ill, he had asked her what she was going to say about him. ‘I will say that you were a juggler. You throw the balls higher than anybody else, and you let them fall lower before you catch them.’ It is as touching an insight into the nature of their relationship as it is into the scale of Foster’s ambition. In the end, Foster is driven by the unblinking determination never to duck a challenge. That, and an implacable inability to stop thinking about what else he could be doing next. In some people, this could be described as the compulsive behaviour of a gambler. And indeed, there is something of that addictive quality in his approach to life. Foster takes risks, with his personal safety, with his clients, with technology and with his business.
He has continually been raising the stakes. It is not that he is unaware of danger, but he is at the same time conscious that facing up to a risk can sometimes be a better strategy than trying to avoid it. He carries with him a memory of a long ago attempt to land his glider on a remote airstrip in California. At the last moment on his descent, he spotted a crop duster beneath him, unaware of his presence above, preparing to take off. Running out of height, and options, he considered what to do. Should he ditch in the scrub on the side of the strip, as he had been trained to in countless exercises, or should he head down for the tarmac, and hope that the crop duster would clear before they collided?
After putting off a decision as long as he could, Foster opted for what looked likely to be the catastrophically riskiest option and headed for the runway. He orbited and set up a last minute low approach, hoping that the plane below would take off in time to avoid a collision, or stay on the ground long enough for him to land in front. If the crop duster started to move at the wrong moment, a collision would be inevitable, and almost certainly fatal. He managed to land heavily, just behind the other aircraft as it accelerated down the runway, emerging unharmed. It was only as he looked closely at the scrub on either side of the strip and saw that it was full of metal, from an irrigation system, that he realised that if he had not ignored the lessons of his training and taken the risk of heading for the landing strip, he would certainly have been killed ploughing into a haystack made of jagged steel.
Foster has never been content with what he has already done. He is always looking for something else, taking little satisfaction in a project once it is finished. He is ready to build in countries that others are reluctant to work with. He is prepared, in his seventies, after a heart attack and a fight with bowel cancer, once mistakenly diagnosed as terminal, to match his physical fitness, courage and coordination against former Olympic athletes, men who are thirty years younger than he is. It is some compensation for the fact that he can no longer fly solo after the heart attack. To Elena Foster’s considerable anxiety, he risks his life with them on the mountain roads of the Pyrenees, slicing his racing bike through the unstable gap between a vertiginous precipice and an eight-axle fifty-tonne articulated lorry at forty miles an hour. Every year he takes part in the punishing twenty-six-mile Engadine cross-country ski marathon. He suffered frostbite one year when he set off without the appropriate windproof gloves. By the time he had noticed that his fingers were turning blue, he judged it was already further to turn back than to go on and complete the race. It is his world outside architecture that gives him some of his most enduring personal relationships. Getting to the wedding of his ski instructor took priority over work.
As a young architect, he took risks by pushing his clients into letting him try out new building methods, and by attempting to build faster than anybody believed possible, and by ignoring the crutch represented by conventional architectural solutions. Why shouldn’t a skyscraper hang between a pair of towers, like a suspension bridge? With what was at the time described as the world’s most expensive office tower, the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank building, Foster proved that it could be done. Why shouldn’t biofuels be used to power an air-conditioning system? Why shouldn’t giant mirrors be used to bring sunshine deep into the heart of an office tower or a parliament? The Reichstag did both, and successfully showed that Foster was not a wide-eyed fantasist.
Now he is ready to risk his architectural reputation by building work calculated to appeal to the tastes of oligarchs in Siberia who have made huge fortunes at breakneck speed, and lost them again, equally quickly. Would Wendy think that Norman had dropped the ball in Moscow, or in Astana, or North Ossetia? Nobody would say that he had done so at Beijing’s airport. A few have said it of the Hearst Tower in New York, even if it prompted Paul Goldberger in the New Yorker to dub Foster the ‘Mozart of modernism’. But the new city of Masdar in the Arabian gulf state of Abu Dhabi, Pont Millau, Wembley Stadium, and the remodelled British Museum are all achievements that suggest that Foster is still remarkably agile.
Norman Foster is a man who is hard to read. He maintains an apparently inscrutable façade that is as carefully composed and unemotional as that of his own work. Outsiders seldom see what is behind it. When he was gravely ill, nobody knew. But his emotional as well as his professional life was transformed when, in October 1994, he was seated next to a striking woman called Elena Ochoa at a dinner in Toledo. Ochoa, on the face of it, was everything Foster is not: passionate, spontaneous, and never afraid to show her emotions.
Ochoa was an academic with a longstanding professorship at the University of Madrid who ran a private clinic. She had been a Fulbright Scholar at UCLA and the University of Chicago. She spent a year conducting research at Cambridge. But she became well known in Spain for her famously controversial television series ‘Let’s Talk about Sex’, which did not flinch from dealing with every taboo subject, from homosexuality to euthanasia, that conservative Catholic societies are shy of facing up to. The series was influential, contributing to the spread of family-planning clinics in Spain. Foster was impressed. By the beginning of the following year, they were inseparable. Ochoa moved to London in April 1995, and they were married the next year. They have two children, Paola and Eduardo. Ochoa went on to start publishing artists’ books, and a photography magazine. In 2009 she opened a new space for contemporary art in Madrid. Her impact on Foster’s recent career has been as profound as it has been on his personal life. With her encouragement, Foster has reshaped his practice to operate on an increasingly ambitious global scale, and given it a new structure to ensure that it will outlast him.
Despite a certain impatience with the cautious British way of doing things, Foster operated at the beginning of his career very much in the conventional manner of architectural practice. He was immersed in London’s architectural community, in which a fluctuating cast of bright young designers moved from office to office, cross-fertilising them in ways that led to a shared method of doing things in several studios.
Jan Kaplicky for example, worked first for Richard Rogers and then for Norman Foster. Ian Ritchie moved in the opposite direction. Alan Stanton and David Chipperfield also worked for a while in both offices. Ian Simpson went back to Manchester after working for Foster, and started to build a series of high-rises in the city. Architecture in those days was a comfortable world of shared assumptions and values, and a shared way of life, of Saabs and children at progressive schools like King Alfred’s, of holidays in the Dordogne, and in many cases, though not Foster’s, of voting Labour.
Michael Hopkins, later to design the Glyndebourne Opera House and Portcullis House, the extension to parliament, became Foster’s first partner in 1970. They met through Hopkins’ wife, Patti, who was still a student at the Architectural Association, where Foster, as a tutor, had been enthusiastic about her work. Hopkins, at the time looking to move on from his job at the office of Sir Frederick Gibberd, wrote to Foster suggesting that they might meet and talk about working together. He offered to make an introduction to his father, a director in Taylor Woodrow, at the time one of the biggest building firms in Britain. Foster was looking to find a partner with the single-mindedness and self-belief to challenge him in the office, in the way that Rogers had once done. Hopkins worked on Willis Faber, and especially on the succession of buildings that the practice designed for IBM in Hampshire. Foster made him a partner, and later gave the same status to two other people in the office, Birkin Haward and Loren Butt (who was not an architect). Foster’s relationship with Hopkins was not the same as the one that he had with Rogers. ‘With Richard we would get angry with each other, but we both enjoyed it. Michael and I were too comfortable with each other.’ In 1976, Hopkins left to establish his own firm with Patti.
With Hopkins gone, Foster rearranged the structure of the office. He became a sole trader again. And it was almost twenty years later, in 1992, before he felt that he was again ready to offer anybody else a stake in his firm. He remained in ultimate control, but he made Spencer de Grey, David Nelson, Ken Shuttleworth and Graham Philips minority partners.
Until the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank was completed, Foster maintained the conventional mantra that small was beautiful. At one time, he told an interviewer that thirty was the ideal number of people in a successful architectural studio. It meant that the office would always stay small enough to allow everybody to know each other, and everybody to make a visible contribution. Most of all, it was a scale that it was claimed would allow architectural quality to remain, not just the highest, but also the only priority. This was a period when the ingrained ethos of the architectural community was that to become too big, or even just big, would in itself undermine the culture of creativity.
Bigness was understood to impose a constant pressure to accept work that could never lead to architecture of quality. Simply in order to keep everybody employed, work that could never turn out well would have to be taken on. There was an anxiety that, if a creative office grew beyond a certain point, the partners would be distracted from the process of making architecture by the need to devote more and more time to issues of management. Or else they would find themselves obliged to bring professional managers into the practice, effectively ceding control of creative decisions. It was an attitude shaped by an explicit divide between commercial architecture and the other kind. There was a gulf between the expectations and the culture of those architectural firms that built speculative office blocks and shopping centres, and the kind of architects who designed the universities and the art galleries. One was expedient, and depended on minimising costs and maximising revenue-generating square footage. The other had cultural ambition. One looked to establish the concept of authorship for architecture, to develop an individual voice in design. The other was pragmatic about visual expression. It’s a division that has all but vanished now. Clients have become bolder in their commissioning strategy and their expectations of what buildings might look like and try to achieve. Architects who, in the past, might never have gone beyond the university campus to look for work, have found themselves being invited to compete to build high-rise office towers. It is a development which is at least in part the result of the growth of Foster + Partners and their work across the architectural spectrum.
While the firm was building the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, it deliberately restricted its work abroad, concentrating on its first major overseas project and the first high-rise it had ever built. In those days it turned down other work in Hong Kong. It was avoiding distractions in order to prove itself. But at a certain point, Foster changed his mind about size and decided to take all the opportunities that his early successes offered him. Perhaps it was because he felt that he had achieved all that he could, running a conventional architectural office, and wanted to try another approach. Once he had looked for the approval of his parents, approval that he never had quite as much of as he would have liked. For a while he certainly achieved the approval of his architectural peers, before they grew uneasy about his success. By growing his office, he had the chance to make a mark on a wider world and to succeed in it. And by spreading his workload across the world – Britain accounts for less than 5 per cent today – he hoped to insulate the practice from local downturns.
The shift from wanting to run a small, tightly controlled practice to presiding over something of the size that Foster + Partners has become, can be compared with the restlessness that took him from gliders to helicopters, and from helicopters to fixed-wing aircraft, and from propeller-driven planes to jets. Each is different, but Foster was determined to be equally successful at every version of flight, just as he has been successful at every version of architectural practice that he has attempted.
Architecture has gone through a dramatic scale shift in the last twenty-five years. In the 1970s, thirty people was a large office. Now Foster is far from being alone in having more than a thousand employees; even such a challenging architect as Zaha Hadid employs several hundred people. The effect of size is a phenomenon that may yet turn out to be the most significant change in practice in recent years. Size offers a capacity for research and speculative thinking that smaller offices cannot afford to invest in.
Size also means that an office can work effectively on the most dauntingly scaled programmes, constrained by apparently impossible deadlines, such as Beijing’s airport which was completed in four years. But the decision to grow the practice did not come without lengthy discussion. Some senior figures in the studio questioned the need to grow beyond 200. Foster and Majidi didn’t want to stop.
The evolution of Foster Associates into Foster + Partners by way of Sir Norman Foster & Partners, has been a step-by-step process. It has been shaped by the development of a management structure that has been adjusted over the years to deal with its growing size. In an organisation of less than two hundred people, everybody can expect to know everybody else, but beyond that more systematic means of achieving central control and offering support are needed. When Foster and Partners had achieved that, and still continued to grow, it passed to the next stage, and needed to go through another restructuring when it grew to more than six hundred people, a size which offers a different set of problems to resolve. Rather than continue trying to run the firm as a single larger and larger entity, the practice reorganised itself in collegiate fashion, as a series of parallel groups. Each of them has a leader, and operates on the whole range of projects, with its own clients, and its own internal loyalties. The change was important, not least for the individual architect to be able to have a sense of belonging to a smaller team.
At the time of writing, Foster + Partners was organised in six groups, but the firm could scale up to operate with more, or if conditions change, cut back to work with less.
The point of this system of groups, rather than organising the firm into specialist departments, is to allow every architect in the company the chance to build at every scale, to make the most of all their skills, and to have the experience of working around the world, rather than to find themselves limited by typology, or by geography or scale. It is an investment in the personal satisfaction of the architects in the practice, in the belief that architects with a fully rounded experience are more likely to sustain the ethos of the office.
The key to maintaining the sense of what is and what is not a Foster + Partners building is the continuing scrutiny of the design board and its guidance to architects throughout the company. The design board – which includes Foster himself as its chairman, Spencer de Grey, David Nelson and Mouzhan Majidi, and now Narinder Sagoo, Armstrong Yakubu and any of the group leaders – scrutinises every project as required, and is ready to insist on a fresh approach if it believes one is necessary. It’s a method that has its origins in Foster’s past, when as a student at Yale he found himself asked to justify his work in front of a jury of visiting critics and the endlessly demanding chairman of the architecture department, Paul Rudolph. It is a strategy that allows one group to learn from the experiences of another, to retain a unified approach to architecture, and for the firm to maintain a sense of intellectual and aesthetic cohesion. And it has enabled the company to recognise new talent. The groups allow such individuals as Stefan Behling to pursue his passionate interest in sustainability and solar power, and maintain his professorship in Germany, at the same time as exploring the potential for sustainable tourism in Libya. It embraces both more recent recruits, such as Gerard Evenden, as well as veterans like Mark Sutcliffe who first worked with Foster in the Team Four period.
Foster has tried hard to create the conditions that will avoid the firm’s work becoming reduced to a formula. He has built one of the strongest international architectural brands, which skilfully combines the aura of an individual approach with corporate reliability, words of course that architects are congenitally disposed to be uncomfortable with. Foster + Partners is coming to resemble not so much any previous large architectural practice, such as SOM, with their federal structures of territorially based offices, or for that matter McKim, Mead and White, or even that of Alfred Waterhouse, perhaps the most successful architect before Foster to emerge from Manchester, but something more like the multiskilled engineering consultancy Arup, where the personality of a strong-minded founder still permeates a large organisation.
In his Hampstead Hill Gardens days, late at night when the phones had stopped ringing, Foster would sit in the office mailing out the invoices and chasing outstanding bills. It was an experience that made him keen to escape from the financial side of architectural practice when he could, and to concentrate on bringing in new commissions and on design.
He looked for managers and financial advisers to take care of the business for him. But none of them could save the practice from repeated financial near-death experiences. The legacy of these has been that, beneath the surface confidence, there is always a certain vulnerability to Foster, who is constantly aware that success can evaporate. He is still scarred by the experience of two Black Fridays, one in the 1980s, the other in the recession of 1992, when he was forced to call in his employees and make multiple redundancies in order to survive. One of the most difficult days was at the end of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank saga. ‘Everybody assumed that we had made a fortune from building the bank. The reality was different.’ He simply did not have enough work to be able to go on employing as many architects as he had been. It meant that some of the most gifted of them suddenly found themselves without a job. It was not an easy moment. Foster’s pride collided with his determination to survive at all costs. James Meller, who had made the first introduction to Buckminster Fuller, was among those sacrificed. Foster kept Jan Kaplicky on for as long as he could, keeping him busy on a series of make-work tasks redrawing old projects for potential publication. Kaplicky took redundancy badly. It was almost ten years before he and Foster would speak again as friends, brought together by the artist Brian Clarke, who collaborated with both of them. Foster admired Kaplicky. They shared a passion for models and aircraft that was inseparable from their architecture. But if Kaplicky had not been forced to set up on his own, he might never have managed to build for himself. When Kaplicky died in 2009, Foster joined Clarke and Zaha Hadid to pay tribute in a celebration of his life at London’s Design Museum.
The second crisis for the office came in 1992 after the collapse of Reichman Brothers, the Canadian developers of Canary Wharf who went bankrupt owing $20 billion. At the same time, the project for the King’s Cross railway lands that the practice was master-planning on a scale to match the massive Canary Wharf office development was also cancelled. By this time, the Foster office in Battersea had grown large enough to employ several hundred people, many of them working on high-rise towers for Canary Wharf that were abruptly cancelled. Inevitably, another round of lay-offs followed.
Foster emerged from the experience determined never to find himself in the same circumstances again. He hired accountants and tax planners and management consultants to propose alternative approaches to running the business. They cost him a great deal of money, and offered plenty of advice, but none of it left Foster + Partners as financially secure as Foster would have liked.
Despite working on some of the biggest projects in the world, Foster discovered his bank was again getting anxious about the state of the firm’s overdraft at the height of the post-millennial construction boom. In 2004, the firm’s accounts showed a loss. His response was to give his undivided attention to running the business. In his seventies he started to look at his own architectural practice as another kind of unusually urgent design problem. He applied himself to the reorganisation of the financial structure of the firm, in much the same way that he had once looked at the Olsen building in the docks. How could he construct a new kind of architectural practice, one that could outlast him, and at the same time become as profitable as the scale of its projects suggested that it ought to be? And perhaps less easily, but much more importantly, that could make him feel secure enough not always to be anxious that the material success he had worked so hard for would slip away with the next construction industry downturn.
Since 1967 when the dissolution of Team Four left Foster and his first wife as the joint owners of the newly constituted Foster Associates, Foster’s practice has had three incarnations. In early 2004 Foster set about devising a fourth version.
I had always believed that business was not for me. We spent millions in fees on advice from the most credible accountants that we gave a mandate to reinvent the company, and they screwed up.
If things had been coasting along, I would never have got involved myself. But they weren’t and I realised that it was time to reinvent the business of architecture.
It took almost five years of continuous effort to carry out the strategy that Foster came up with. He transformed a loss-making business into a highly profitable practice. It allowed him to sell a minority stake in the business, while still retaining, along with key staff shareholders, the controlling interest. He would be selling from a position of strength, when revenues and prospects were high, rather than bringing in an outside investor at a moment of crisis. And it would provide the firm with a financial cushion that would free it from a dependence on short-term finance from its bankers.
The company needed a new management structure with a chief executive with the authority to be able to take over the day-to-day responsibilities from Foster himself. There were candidates in the office, senior figures that had been with him since the Fitzroy Street era, who had helped him build the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank on which every subsequent success had depended, but they were in their fifties and sixties. After much soul searching, Foster took the decision to skip a generation in choosing the new chief executive, in the interests of reenergising the practice and achieving a longer-term continuity in the management of the company. Initially Foster found himself having to face up to the disappointment of old colleagues. However, as the practice grew he succeeded in demonstrating that they had a key role to play ranging across the world to maintain an independent overview of all Foster + Partners’ projects.
Architectural practice is always a trade-off between looking after those employees with the fire to run their own firms and trying to persuade them to stay, even when their instincts are to leave as quickly as they can, and those who stay but tend to be skilled followers rather than the natural leaders a practice needs for the long term. Over the years, Foster has had plenty of the former. David Chipperfield, who rebuilt the Neues Museum in Berlin, two-time Stirling Prize winner Chris Wilkinson, responsible for the Gateshead Bridge, and David Marks, who conceived the London Eye, all worked in the Foster office before setting up on their own. Michael Hopkins and Birkin Haward both started their own businesses. Sometimes directors have been poached by commercial rivals to allow them to compete more effectively. Ken Shuttleworth’s departure was accompanied by a deft publicity campaign that strained credulity by portraying him as the main author of Swiss Re, the Millennium Footbridge, Hong Kong’s airport, the Barcelona communications tower and even Foster and Partners’ immensely detailed plans for New York’s Ground Zero competition. Shuttleworth’s departure did nothing to hinder Foster + Partners’ accelerating growth.
David Nelson and Spencer de Grey had both been with Foster for three decades. Without them, the firm could not have been what it had become. But Foster did not see appointing a successor as chief executive from their ranks as the right solution. He wanted to find the best-qualified candidate from a younger generation, who could take a twenty-year perspective. With his controlling stake in the business, the decision was ultimately his. But Foster knew that, to take the organisation with him, he needed to give the staff a say in the selection. There was an elaborate consultation process, from which Majidi emerged as the first choice, not just of Foster, but of the rest of the senior management of the company. Majidi had joined the office in 1987, immediately after graduating from Strathclyde University in Glasgow, where he had grown up.
The change in the company’s financial and management structure was devised in such a way as to allow Foster enough freedom from his day-to-day management role in the office to concentrate on design, and on the ambassadorial role that he plays for Foster + Partners. It is a job that involves a huge amount of travel for the presentations and the meetings that a worldwide practice with a high degree of political involvement for its major projects demands. It’s the way to win work, and then to be able to make the work get built.
With the group system and the succession in place, Foster set about finding the right investor. He took the message of the returns that were to be made from investing in Foster + Partners to the City of London, and discovered that he enjoyed the process.
When I wanted to seduce banks to buy into being part of the deal for a minority share, I took them around the studio and showed them how our groups work. I talked about our strategy for diversification that meant that we would not be too dependent on any single country. I took them to the model-making workshop and showed them what we did there.
From a number of possible investors, the London-based investment fund 3i emerged as the closest fit. The fund put up the money in the belief that Foster + Partners had the potential for substantial capital growth. They are represented on the Foster board, whose management have an option to purchase their shares should the chance ever arise.
At the time of the sale, financial analysts calculated that the ten largest architectural practices in the world accounted for less than 1 per cent of the £90 billion spent annually on construction. In any other advanced service industry it would be seen as a derisory proportion for market leaders. Compelling economic logic suggested that the construction industry would rapidly shift to reflect the structure of other businesses. But in the meantime, even a tiny increase in market share could quickly double the revenues of a firm such as Foster + Partners.
The sale was in many ways the most impressive financial deal that he, or any other architect had ever done, one that would push him into the unwelcome scrutiny of the Sunday Times Rich List. When the sale of a minority stake became public, it was understood as a move startling enough to shock some of his architectural peers.
In 2007, Foster + Partners came into being, transforming the practice from a company unequivocally controlled by its founder, to an entity with almost seventy individual shareholders, some still in their early thirties, who hold their shares as long as they are employees. After the sale to 3i, Foster + Partners became an architectural giant.
As well as architects, it has engineers, IT specialists, accountants, managers and model makers working for it. Within Foster + Partners, there is not only a team of architects and designers who specialise in researching the potential of new geometries, but also a group of industrial designers who work on furniture, door handles, taps and cutlery. There is a team that helps their clients plan the layout of their offices, and yet another that deals with presentations and proposals.
At the start of 2009 there were twenty-five Foster + Partners offices around the world. Some were temporary, established with the purpose of overseeing a particular building project. Others, in locations in which there is a continuing stream of work, are semi-permanent. Initially all the design work was done in London, but this is beginning to change, and a Foster team member charged with seeing construction through to completion will move to the site when building starts to ensure that the project matches up to the original conception.
The numbers in Battersea fluctuate, but in 2008, when Foster + Partners had a turnover of £170 million and 260 projects under way, ranging from boats, bridges, and aircraft to individual houses, and from skyscrapers to studies intended to shape entire cities, the firm’s workforce reached a peak of 1,400.
Foster took steps to protect his rights to his name, and to control the way that his work was used. He opened the Sunday newspapers one morning to find a development of apartments designed by the office marketed with his picture. He was determined that it could not happen without his knowledge again.
The new structure did not mean that Foster + Partners escaped the fallout from the credit crunch. When Dubai’s gravity-defying economy came abruptly crashing to the ground, at exactly the same time that Russia, New York and London put every major office project on hold, it was inevitable that even the well-financed Foster + Partners would find itself having to cut back on staff. Other architects had to be even tougher in terms of the percentage of their employees that they made redundant. The sheer size of Foster + Partners meant that the numbers involved were daunting. In the spring of 2009 it had to lay off 400 people in its offices around the world. With its financial partner 3i itself under pressure from its poorly performing share price, there was no room to delay bringing down overheads in a way that was clearly painful for those who lost their jobs. Architecture is the most cyclical of activities. After the financial crisis, Foster + Partners’ workload recovered and the practice started recruiting again.
The technical methods used by architects have changed enormously since the 1960s. Ink, tracing paper, drawing boards with parallel motion, and the T-square, have all been consigned more or less to the recycling bin, along with the drawing office smock and the set of French curves that used to hang on every drawing office wall. Imperial measurements have vanished everywhere except America: it seems impossibly archaic now to hear Foster reel off the structural dimensions of the Reliance Controls factory in feet and inches. Lettering is no longer applied to a sheet of tracing paper with a stencil, or rubbed down from a sheet of Letraset.
Painstaking cross-hatching applied, layer upon layer, to build up shadow and texture on a set of presentation drawings is no longer the distraction from thinking about design that it once was. It can be laid down with a keyboard and a mouse in seconds. Digitalisation has had a profound effect on the process of design, as well as on the vocabulary of architecture, in both obvious and much less predictable ways. Architecture has shifted architects away from their reliance on the traditional drawing skills, and made possible new ways in which to visualise and understand space. It has transformed the way that architects communicate their ideas to their clients, and to the builders, contractors and engineers who turn them into physical reality. Until the last decade, very few people who commissioned architecture have been fully able to understand the significance of an architect’s plan before it was built, just as very few non-musicians in a concert hall can understand what the music that they are hearing is like simply from being shown a score by its composer. Even an axonometric projection, something architects assume is self-explanatory, baffles most people not familiar with its conventions. But the digital fly-through is not musical notation, or a cross-section, or a mysterious projection convention. For the first time, digital rendering offers a straightforward way to convey to a non-expert what the experience of moving through an architectural space that has not yet been built will be like. The poignant presentation that the Foster practice put together for their submission for the Ground Zero competition in 2003, tracing the journey of a child through the complex, and down into the memorial that they proposed to create within the footprints of the lost Twin Towers, was a resonant demonstration of what is now possible with such techniques.
In the face of such a reduction in the scope for the unexpected and for misunderstandings in the translation from design to built reality, the architect could be said to have rather less room for manoeuvre and for managing and orchestrating the expectations and responses of a client than in the past. The balance of power between architect and client has shifted. The client is in a position to be more detailed and more demanding in his requirements and to be able to play a more informed part in the creative aspects of the design process.
Yet at the same time the impact of digital techniques to convey space and complex forms has not done away with the need for an evaluation of a design through material means at each stage of the design process. Perhaps paradoxically, it has encouraged production of the large-scale physical models that are a particular speciality of Foster + Partners. To explore the physical form of a wall or a window in a prototype before it has been built has been an essential part of the Foster approach since the earliest days. The more architects can speculate freely about what architecture can be, using digital techniques, the more they need to be able to understand the material implications.
As visitors walk into the Foster + Partners studio, they pass an entire wall of models of all sizes stacked up to the ceiling. These reflect past projects, some built, others not, in a way that echoes the clutter of architectural fragments that pack every inch of Sir John Soane’s house. They certainly have a seductive charm, but for the architect, these are not toys or sales aids but working tools. They are the means to explore the impact of design decisions, at the scale of both the smallest detail, and at the level of the master plan. Those projects that are in the design development phase are represented by large models aligned along the window wall of the studio, overlooking the Thames. The rest, piled up the ceiling, represent a glimpse of the office’s accumulated memory.
The models in the studio are just a fraction of the Foster archive. The rest are in a series of climate-conditioned fine art stores. They contain hundreds of models of all scales, materials and sizes that provide a record of Foster’s work, going back to his earliest projects as an independent architect. Before the disastrous fire of 2004 that destroyed so much Brit Art, they were kept in MoMART’s bleak Hackney sheds. Amid a clutch of Barry Flanagan hares, and a Damien Hirst, just back from Brooklyn, you could see a giant representation of the dome of the Reichstag, big enough to stand up in, just like one of the great models of St Paul’s made for Christopher Wren. Foster’s unbuilt scheme to relocate BBC Radio to the site of the Langham Hotel lingered on as a giant model, broken up in sections, and stacked up to the ceiling. There were scores of studies for high-rises in Japan, Germany, Lebanon, Australia and America. There were beautifully detailed designs for remodelling London’s South Kensington, for building a new airport in Shanghai, and universities in Malaysia. You could see the original structural model for the Sainsbury Centre at the University of East Anglia, discarded in favour of the even more beautiful version that was actually built when Foster had his last-minute brainwave. There are rough-and-ready foam models, made in the studio, as well as immaculately finished models that were intended to impress clients.
The extensive use of modelling is a thread that has run through every incarnation of the practice. In his days as a student at Yale, Foster’s graduation city-of-the-future project stood out for the remarkable quality of the model that he had made. When London’s City Hall was under construction, a full-size section of the hand-rail for the ramp that spirals all the way up the interior of the building in a continuous ribbon was made up in the Foster workshop in Battersea, and positioned in the office forecourt. It was there to give the design team a sense of the physical quality of the object that they had designed, to see how it would feel, and how it would look in different light conditions. Such mock-ups and simulations have always been an essential part of architectural practice. Mies van der Rohe, for example, managed to lose his first commission when his client decided that the house he was working on wasn’t quite what he wanted on the basis of what he saw from the full-size elevations that were painted on canvas screens and positioned on the site. But even against this background, models are unusually important for Foster, and the precision of his work has its roots in the care with which every possible option is modelled and prototyped before a final decision is taken.
Such an approach to design imposes a demand for model-making skills that, for all the purposeful concentration of the rows of architects at their digital workstations, make some parts of the Foster + Partners building feel more like a particularly elegant factory, full of spray booths and cutting and turning machines, rather than a conventional white-collar workplace. And half a mile away from the main office there is now a vast model-making studio, big enough to work on multiple giant models.
The models reappear in Foster’s personal studio, a former chapel attached to his house in Switzerland. One wall is occupied by a vast representation of Beijing Airport. There is a Swiss Re model and one of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, exactly like the model that stands in the office in Battersea. Another version is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
And in an echo of his childhood passion for model aircraft, shelf after shelf in his study is stacked with them.
Digital analysis has changed not just the process of design, but also the way that buildings are made and the nature of the forms that they can be designed to take on. A digital file sent direct from the architect to the factory can form the basis of the pattern-cutting programme that a cladding manufacturer employs to produce the skin for a building. And this in turn allows for far more complex geometries that have become, if not routine, then certainly much more widespread in the last decade. It has allowed architecture to take on something of the character of dressmaking on an epic scale, with the building treated as a structure clad in fabric that needs to be cut from sheet material in the most economical way, as if cutting a pattern for a garment. And just as with a garment, the seams and joints need to be placed with care to create an appropriate form.
If making buildings has become a different process over the last decades, then so has the way in which architects are seen by the world.
There were times, in the 1980s and 1990s, when Foster felt that Britain was not giving him his due. Like many others, he came to believe that he could only get work outside the country. And even when he got it, Britain was ignoring his success – or so he believed. David Chipperfield and Zaha Hadid would have told much the same story about themselves. In fact, it is hard to imagine an architect better known in Britain that Foster. First knighted, then elevated to the House of Lords, Foster has earned every conceivable honour and distinction, including the Order of Merit from the Queen, a distinction that brings with it a dinner every three years with the sovereign; the Royal Gold Medal for Architecture; as well as the Pritzker and Stirling prizes. His new university in Malaysia won the Aga Khan Award in 2007, and he was a recipient of the Japanese Prix Imperium and of the Prince of the Asturias prize.
But as time passes, with every success comes the nagging sense of another generation pressing behind him. Architecture is a profession in which age is not normally a handicap. On the contrary. Philip Webb, who designed William Morris’s Red House, once suggested that no architect should be allowed to design a house until they were forty. Frank Lloyd Wright was working on the Guggenheim Museum well past the age of ninety.
In the first decade of this century, Foster’s buildings certainly have changed in their emphasis. They have begun to take advantage of the complex forms that are made possible by new techniques of making buildings and analysing them. And they have responded to shifts in scale and geography that are reshaping architecture. He has also become interested in working with other architects. Though in the event the project did not succeed, Foster worked with Gehry on a huge plan for the redevelopment of Milan’s trade fair site. It was the first in a series of collaborative projects that has seen Foster work with Jean Nouvel in London and Rem Koolhaas in Dallas.
With the passage of time, the key buildings of Foster’s early career – the Sainsbury Centre, the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, Willis Faber in Ipswich – look more and more impressive, not less. But the cumulative impact of the torrent of Foster buildings that followed them has changed the way that Foster is now perceived. When he was still running a young architectural practice, every new design that Foster unveiled could be presented as an event. Now that there are so many new designs coming from the office, it is impossible to regard them in the same way that they once might have been. There are still show stoppers, such as the Pont Millau, whose unveiling stilled every critic. But there are other projects that certainly do not stand up to the same level of intensive scrutiny that those pioneering early works do. And there are a few, Birmingham’s Sea Life Aquarium, for example, that are best ignored.
There are others that get unjustifiably overlooked in the seemingly endless stream of completed projects emerging on a production line from an office that is now building hundreds of projects at a time. Foster has moved from creating a limited number of masterpieces to running an office that has significantly raised the standard of the ordinary. It could be seen as a much more challenging achievement, and has also allowed for the possibility of some actual failures.
The firm was once regarded as a radical choice, appealing only to a certain kind of client. It is now a reliably innovative one. It’s a shift that has allowed Foster + Partners to move centre stage. They have succeeded in making architecture of quality a more mainstream aspiration than it once was in Britain. The challenge for Foster + Partners now is to retain its openness to new fields of inquiry, to keep its sense of freshness and lack of complacency now that it is no longer an ambitious newcomer but a landmark at the very centre of the architectural landscape. In London, Foster + Partners’ work is no longer a matter of sporadic individual buildings. There are now so many of them that it is too late to look at them one at a time. Foster’s impact is not at the level of one-off buildings, it has taken on an essential part in shaping the overall context.
Walking across Tower Bridge, you can see a city formed to a remarkable extent by Foster buildings and plans. In the foreground is City Hall, and the office development known as More London. Just across the Thames is the Foster + Partners office scheme by the Tower of London. A little way to the west is the Millennium Bridge. On the skyline is the Swiss Re tower, and the crescent-shaped slab that wraps itself around the Lloyds building. Further in the distance is the HSBC tower at Canary Wharf. Elsewhere around London, the firm has built Stansted Airport, Wembley Stadium, the British Museum’s new court. On London Wall there are three significant Foster buildings. It’s a crystalline world of glass icebergs, and smooth wavelike forms, of structural gymnastics, and carefully considered landscapes.
Foster + Partners now has the experience of working in every continent of the world, and with every building type, from airports to skyscrapers, from schools to private houses, hotels, bridges and boats. It has the resources to research the issues of energy consumption, transport and prefabrication. The projects that Foster + Partners works on are becoming larger too, which might be an important factor in determining the recruiting policies of architectural offices.
Foster himself suggests that he has become more interested in working at the scale of the city rather than individual buildings. It’s a development that has been reflected in the reconfiguration of the meeting rooms on the mezzanine level of the Foster office in London. There are fewer of them, but they are bigger, to allow for the kind of large-scale models required to represent a master plan on an urban scale, and the large groups of people needed to work on them together. Architects must be prepared to work on master plans that can take on the scale of a whole city, or even a region. They are so big now that it is impossible to be entirely precise about their size.
Focusing on narrow architectural definitions of the scale of a project becomes difficult when 100,000 square metres is now the standard unit by which architectural work is measured in some parts of the world. And then there are much larger buildings to deal with. The Central Market in Abu Dhabi that Foster is working on spreads over 500,000 square metres, which is to say ten times the size of the Canary Wharf office development. The new terminal at Beijing Airport covers an almost unimaginable 13 million square metres – an entire city.
When Norman Foster established his office in 1967 there was a sense that architectural reputations were established primarily on the basis of the work that an architect would build within their own country. In the past there might have been a few projects overseas to add an exotic touch to an architectural career, but these were more often than not understood as diversions from the main effort. That is not true now. Architecture is as universal as it was in the Middle Ages, when groups of itinerant masons went from cathedral to cathedral, moving from one construction site to the next. In their constant travel they made gothic architecture in France and Germany and England an integral whole.
Foster + Partners to date has built in thirty-two countries. The staff in London come from a spread of places that is as wide as their workload. The company attracts ambitious and gifted young architects from all around the world to learn, and to get the chance to build.
The first overseas projects Foster Associates worked on were in Norway and in the Canary Islands, both the result of the connection with Fred Olsen, and a natural outgrowth of their domestic practice. It was followed by the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, which was perhaps the last manifestation of a colonial connection, with a design being shipped out to what was still a colony from the other side of the world. Foster’s role was to supply an expertise and a service that was not at the time locally available.
Since then, the nature of international practice has been transformed. Those early projects reflected a one-way transaction: Britain was exporting expertise while holding the outside world at arm’s length. But the more that Foster and Partners worked outside Britain, the more it became a two-way process. They were exporting their skills, but at the same time they were, consciously or not, finding their view of the world transformed by the places in which they worked, and the kind of projects that they were asked to take on. Once you have built a skyscraper in Shanghai, or an airport in Hong Kong, it is hard to see the world only through the perspective of working with the preconceptions of fitting into the City of London, where architecture can sometimes feel as constrained as dentistry.
The experience of working in cultures in which governments are prepared to countenance radical new approaches to development by trying to connect transport systems in an integrated way, or to drive large-scale projects through a thicket of competing local interests, can serve to reshape a firm’s understanding of architectural practice back in Britain. When Hong Kong decided on the closure of the territory’s original airport at Kai Tak, and its replacement through the construction of an entirely new one, with runways built on land reclaimed from the sea, connected to the city centre by a brand-new mass-transit rail link, and accompanied by the development of an entire new town, it made the reluctance of London to consider a similarly radical solution to the problem of overcrowding and noise pollution at Heathrow by relocating it to the Thames estuary seem self-defeatingly timid.
The context in which Foster + Partners is now working has had a significant impact on the character of its work. To undertake projects for heads of state in Kazakhstan, or for state-controlled corporations in China, is to be placed in the position of finding ways of meeting the aspirations of cultures with aesthetic expectations very different from those that prevail in Edinburgh, or Barcelona, or London. And it is perhaps the most challenging aspect of the future for the practice. It must find a way to work that will allow a Foster + Partners detached from its roots in London to retain its sense of purpose and meaning. Foster is trying to find ways to address such new building types as the Kazakhstan ecumenical centre, its Palace of Peace and Reconciliation. And to try to find an appropriate form of architectural expression for them is not just a logistical exercise, but a search that goes to the heart of architecture.
Foster + Partners is far too large and sophisticated an operation to be understood as a vehicle for one individual. But Norman Foster is a remarkable architect, and in Foster + Partners he has created an organisation which can carry on the practice of architecture in a way that has the essence of Norman Foster and his personal history and determination at its very centre, in any context.
Norman Foster’s Madrid office is on the Paseo de Castellana. Two of his most recent projects have been pinned to the walls. Behind him are the early surveys for a commission to work on the Château Margaux, that will include the first piece of new architecture on the estate since 1810. It sits opposite a series of studies for the expansion of the Pushkin Museum in Moscow that will create a cultural complex larger than either Tate Modern in London or the Museum of Modern Art. A portfolio of photographs shows the array of derelict timber structures surrounding the Pushkin that he is being asked to restore for a project that has the personal approval of Vladimir Putin.
But what Foster really wants to talk about is an entirely new project that has been much on his mind. The question of the affordable house. In conversation with Ricky Burdett, director of the London School of Economics Urban Age programme, he was struck by the figure of $7,500, the sum typically spent on making a self-built basic home in a São Paulo favela, or an illegal Mexico City squatter settlement, or Bogota´, or Mumbai. He was fascinated by the constraints – typically the limits of the size of components that can be fitted into a pick-up truck, and by the potential of using the electrical appliances that even such squatter homes typically have in a more energy-efficient way.
Foster’s next mission is to follow in the footsteps of Le Corbusier and Jean Prouve and Buckminster Fuller, all of whom tried and failed to create mass-produced homes. Except that Foster, with his connections with Indian industrialists, international bankers and high-tech manufacturers in America, Britain and Spain, has no intention of failing in mass-producing homes that cost the purchaser no more than a cheap car.
In the sense that patience is commonly understood, Norman Foster is not a patient man. What he does have in abundance is concentration. Juggling the cyclic stick that moves a helicopter up or down, at the same time as moving the collective lever with its twist-grip throttle, and depressing the foot pedals connected to the tail rotor in order to allow a Bell Jet Ranger to swivel on its own axis, is a kind of dance that needs complete control and the complete concentration that is Foster’s version of patience. So does assembling an intricate scale-model of a vintage aircraft with glue, razor blades, sandpaper and a watchmaker’s glass, or running a marathon, or understanding the essence of a complex design problem.
Foster is quick to boil up into sudden explosions of frustration when the irritating distractions of everyday life suddenly become intolerable. He gets angry with the desk left half cleared, with the studio kitchen less than spotless, with the books shelved in the wrong place, or with the camera that has no batteries. It is an anger that evaporates just as fast as it explodes. He expresses emotion in ways that run counter to the carefully controlled nature of his work. He needs constant stimulation, and change.
He works on a project in intensive bursts, then moves on to the next and the one after that, before returning to the first problem, like an advanced chess player contesting six games at once. He slips in and out of focus; distracted by the next idea that flashes through his consciousness. Concentration, by its nature, fluctuates. In the early days, one associate remembers a presentation with a client and the design team, at which Foster’s attention wandered long enough for him to doodle a polo shirt, which he later sent his assistant off to buy, before returning to the project in front of him.
If he is impatient, he is also a man untouched by scepticism, which is a quality whose absence is helpful for an architect. To make a building with any flicker of genuine creative ambition requires its architect to suspend disbelief. It demands the unwavering investment of every ounce of emotional capital that he has in the conviction that his design is actually going to make the transition from paper to steel and glass.
In the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, he must live and breathe a design, unconditionally, month after month, without ever, even for a second, betraying the slightest doubt that it will be built. Foster has designed twenty airports, but only four have been built. Out of every eight competitions he takes part in, only one leads to a completed building. And even when it comes to the successful projects where the fees get paid, only one in four produces a building. Yet he must not only design it, but lobby for it, help raise money for it, and do his best to sell it as well. Then he must fight to build it on a rain-sodden, muddy construction site with a contractor who is more interested in finding profitable new ways to use the legal interpretation of the contract than in building the architect’s vision.
The process demands the self-knowledge needed to stop the architect from falling into the banal trap of the Fountainhead Complex, losing all touch with reality in the pursuit of a megalomaniac fantasy.
What is not quite so clear is whether the architect needs to be an optimist, rather than a pessimist. Foster could be understood to incline to the latter state of mind.
‘There are two kinds of pilot. There is the one who takes off and is shocked and surprised at an engine failure. I am in the second category: I am wonderfully surprised if there is no engine failure after I am in the air,’ he says.