Bicycles have fascinated Foster since he was an adolescent: for their mechanical precision, as well as their performance.

Norman Foster, born 1935, in Reddish, moved to a house on Crescent Grove in Levenshulme, on the outskirts of Manchester (top right), before his first birthday. His grandparents, uncle and aunts all lived in nearby streets. Norman was the only child of Lilly and Robert Foster. He remembers them as loving but distant parents who worked too hard for him to have the time to get to know them as well as he would have wanted. Foster’s tricycle gave way to a long line of bicycles on which he spent his later adolescence exploring Manchester and its surroundings.

In 1946 Foster passed the eleven-plus exam, the great class barrier of the post-war British educational system, and secured a place at Burnage High School. As these pages from his childhood sketchbooks show, he had already begun to draw. He found his art master the most sympathetic of his teachers, and for his Art O-level took a course in architectural history, which, alongside his discovery of Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier on the shelves of the local library, was his first introduction to architecture. But after failing two out of his nine O-level exams, he left school to work at Manchester Town Hall.

As a student, Foster began to win prizes for his elegantly analytical drawings such as this one of Bourne Mill in Cambridgeshire.

Paul Rudolph, the dean of the architecture school at Yale, where Foster won a scholarship to spend a postgraduate year, was an inspired teacher who pushed Foster hard with a demanding series of design exercises, starting with a school.

Foster also worked with Richard Rogers, whom he met at Yale, on a master plan for a university campus.

As an undergraduate at Manchester University, Foster (top picture, in bow tie; above, in sunglasses), unlike many less well-off students in the 1950s, couldn’t get a grant, and had to fund his studies with a range of jobs. At Yale he met Richard Rogers (above right, centre) and the American Carl Abbot (above right, right).

Foster returned from America to join Rogers in setting up Team Four, a shortlived architectural practice. In three years they built Reliance Controls (above), a factory outside Swindon that has now been demolished, and was perhaps the first example of High Tech in Britain; and a number of houses, the most impressive of which, Creak Vean, in Cornwall (right and below) was for Richard Rogers’ father-in-law, Marcus Brumwell. Foster’s seductive drawings helped secure planning permission.

Before Creak Vean was completed, Foster and Rogers designed a simple glass-canopied shelter for Marcus and Rene Brumwell, on a headland overlooking the Fal estuary close to the site of the house, where they could sit out of the wind, enjoy a spectacular view, make tea and listen to the wireless.

After Team Four was dissolved, Foster started a new practice, Foster Associates, with his late wife, the architect Wendy Foster. Initially they worked on a series of simple, domestic projects, then designed a series of industrial buildings. The breakthrough projects were the offices for Willis Faber in Ipswich, and the Sainsbury Centre at the University of East Anglia, of which Buckminster Fuller (top) memorably asked, ‘How much does your building weigh, Norman?’

The success of the Olsen building in London’s docks, with its at that time sensational use of glass walls with no visible means of support, got Foster onto the cover of architectural magazines, and attracted two key clients, Willis Faber and Robert Sainsbury. It also allowed him the resources to pursue his early passion for flight, in the shape of the first of a series of gliders, which quickly gave way to powered aircraft.

Foster was the outsider in the competition to design a new skyscraper headquarters for the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank in 1979, having never built a bank, or anything taller than three floors. He won with a brilliant analysis of a hugely complex site, and came up with a design which, after a rapid series of alternative options, redefined what office towers could be. The structure, like a bridge, was prefabricated and shipped to Hong Kong. The interior is dominated by a spectacular, cathedral-like void, topped by a sun scoop, and an array of mirrors that tracks the sun to bring daylight deep into the interior.

The Willis Faber building fits into an irregular site close to Ipswich’s historic centre not by replicating the brick facades of its neighbours but by reflecting them in its black glass skin. The plan is a series of irregular, gentle curves, like a black glass grand piano. The interior brought glamour to the workplace, with a searing palette of yellow and green, which runs counter to Foster’s reputation for careful monochrome restraint.

The late 1970s were a particularly bleak time for contemporary architecture in Britain. The soured utopias of concrete social housing triggered a crisis of confidence. The Sainsbury Centre changed all that. Confident, strikingly beautiful and radical in conception, it pointed to a new direction. It brings what could have been several distinct buildings into one unified structure: a gallery to house the Sainsbury collection, teaching spaces, a café and a gallery. The idea of a sleek tube in the landscape came early. But it was only at the last minute, when the structure had already been designed, that Foster refined the project, switching from a portal frame cluttered with services, into the present version with a deep truss.

Crucial to Foster’s long-term career was his decision not to move to Hong Kong with the rest of his team to build the bank, but to stay in London and ensure that there were new projects to work on when it was finished. The strategy paid off: he was appointed to design the new terminal for Stansted, London’s third airport, a design that served to redefine the way in which airports are planned. Services are kept below the main circulation areas, rather than on the roof, allowing lightweight structures and plenty of daylight.

Foster beat Jean Nouvel and Frank Gehry to secure the commission to design Nîmes’s Médiathèque, a library and art gallery just across the street from the Maison Carrée, the miraculously well-preserved Roman monument at the centre of the city. In such a sensitive context, it adopts a studiously unobtrusive approach. Foster’s interest in urbanism was demonstrated in the way that he used the building to develop a strategy towards clearing the streets of parked cars and clutter.

Foster married Elena Ochoa, in 1996. She was Professor of Psychopathology at the University of Madrid for many years, and from 1997 became involved with contemporary art and photography. Her publishing house, Ivorypress, is mainly recognised for its artists’ books. Norman and Elena have two children. Above: Foster’s practice in London.

No building is more symbolically charged than the Reichstag in Berlin. Its burning triggered the Nazi seizure of power; the Red Army stormed it at the end of World War Two; and when the two Germanies reunited, the decision to move the parliament of the enlarged state back there from Bonn marked the end of the Cold War. Foster’s first competition entry would have exorcised the past, placing the whole structure under an oversailing roof. Cost issues forced a rethink, and the cupola was a further development at the insistence of German politicians, who saw it as a link with the old building.

Filling the void left at the heart of the British Museum by the departure of the British Library was both a conceptual and an architectural problem. Robert Smirke had planned an open courtyard, which was soon filled up with the circular reading room. The shell of the reading room is retained at the centrepiece of what Foster conceived as a grand public space that would improve movement around the crowded museum, under a lightweight glass bubble. Most of the attention at the opening focused on exactly where the stone used to face it had come from: England, as specified in the contract, or France, as turned out to be the case.

Bridges depend on the skill of an engineer as well as the vision of an architect. In the case of the Millennium footbridge in London (right), it was a team from Arup who made it possible, and who had to come up with a solution to stabilise it once its tendency to wobble under the load of pedestrian traffic revealed itself. For the spectacular Pont Millau (below), as high off the valley floor as the Eiffel Tower, it was Michel Virlogeux.

The first presentation for the new Hearst Tower was scheduled to take place in New York on the day of the destruction of the World Trade Center. Despite the crisis, Hearst took the decision to go ahead and build a new tower to accommodate their publishing business, on a base formed by an Art Deco street frontage designed by Joseph Urban in the 1930s. The triangulated structure with eroded corners is a striking new approach to tower-building in Manhattan, which provides a strength-to-weight ratio that would have been endorsed by Buckminster Fuller, to whom it owes a debt. The interior has a remarkable art work by Richard Long (above), painstakingly placed by hand, using mud.

This photograph of the new roof of the British Museum shows the arch at Wembley Stadium also designed by Foster + Partners, in the distance, miles to the north west. The parabola form is a striking new landmark on the city’s skyline, and a measure of the remarkable scale of the impact that Foster has had on London, where he has built the most prominent new tower, Swiss Re, City Hall, and towers at Canary Wharf.

Completed in 2004, Chesa Futura is an apartment building overlooking St Moritz, in Switzerland. The free-form shape, designed to maximise views, seemed to mark a new departure for Foster + Partners in their approach to geometry. The cloud-like exterior is faced with 250,000 wooden shingles, which were cut, one by one, from 100 larch trees by a skilled craftsman.

The new Beijing airport took four years to build, less time than was needed for the rather smaller fifth terminal at Heathrow just to clear the formidable barriers represented by the planning system in Britain. The Foster team, lead by Mouzhan Majidi, Foster + Partners’ chief executive, who was previously responsible for building Hong Kong’s airport, started work in Beijing on Christmas Day 2003, and set up their office in the ballroom of the old airport hotel shortly afterwards.

When it is completed, Masdar will be a focus for Abu Dhabi’s investment in zero-emission technologies, a mix of research facilities and offices, with homes that can accommodate up to 100,000 people. Foster + Partners plan to combine traditional methods to use wind and shade for cooling, with advanced ideas such as electric-powered, self-steering, driverless transport to achieve a carbon-neutral footprint overall.