Luis Fernández-Galiano   Sir Paul McCartney’s expression can be applied well to Lord Foster of Thames Bank. If the inspired music of the old boy of Liverpool is the fruit of effort and harmony, the rigorous architecture of the former young man from Manchester feeds equally f

Born in Manchester the first of June of 1935, Norman Foster built his first structure – a tiny glass refuge in Cornwall that retrospectively can be seen as the conceptual seed of his work –in 1964, and the almost thirty years in-between trace an itin

I was interested win architecture and design from school, and probably like a lot of boys, I was interested in model aircraft, construction kits, making models, meccano... all those things. I have also been interested in sketching and drawing for as

I had no experience in the field of design or architecture or anything, but on paper I did have some credibility through the time that I had spent in local government and the part time studies that I had done. So I ended up with the position as assis

At the end of the term, when it came to the summer, and this was really quite a regular pattern (one year there was one exception when I worked in the office of Hugh Casson, here in London, but I think still travelled even then) I would find a job th

I was very fortunate, I got a Henry Fellowship to Yale, and that was absolutely incredible... I mean Manchester was a nine to five mentality and Yale opened on the first day of term and closed on the last... America was incredibly refreshing... I had

Back from the USA in 1963, Norman Foster joined Richard Rogers, Su Rogers and Wendy Cheesman to create Team 4, a practice that lasted until 1967, when Foster and Rogers moved apart to pursue their own independent careers. Richard Rogers had been a fr

Built in 1964 for the Brumwells on a wooded hill by the Fal estuary, this refuge for picnics on sailing outings is a minimal shelter with cooker and sink that affords magnificent views over the river. Seeking to avoid disturbance to the natural site,

The home of Su Rogers’s parents hangs over an existing boathouse on a creek, and is both a sailing base and an exhibition space for their art collection. Developed between 1964 and 1966, the final building shows a mature complexity in its blending of

Residential commissions were a laboratory for Team 4: the teachings of Rudolph, Chermayeff and Stirling or the influence of Kahn combined with the popularity of Siedlung Halen, and all were tested in several unbuilt projects and two completed schemes

If the family was changing, so was the workplace. And this electronics factory, designed and built in ten months of 1965 and 1966, gave Team 4 the opportunity to develop a system which was both a model of industrial construction and a paradigm of ind

The phenomenal success of Reliance Controls did not significantly help the new partnership in obtaining commissions: Norman and Wendy Foster spent the first 18 months of their independent professional life in Hampstead working on a school competition

In the optimistic and experimental climate of the sixties, the 1967 competition for a school and multipurpose building in the Welsh town of Newport allowed the newly founded Foster Associates to develop the umbrella concept in this maiden project whi

The tough labour environment of the docks was very different from the smart atmosphere of the electronics industry, but Foster found in Fred Olsen a progressive client with whom to develop the ideas of industrial democracy advanced in Reliance. After

The environmental bubble of the flower nation of the sixties was a pop fantasy delivered in two versions, pneumatic and geodesic; Foster tinkered with both. In the case of the inflatable structure, the opportunity arose when a rapidly growing company

This silent galss box houses 750 employees in 10,800 m2; but the huge container dissolves into the Hampshire landscape, its bronze-tinted facade reflecting the surrounding trees without interference from the minimalist detailing of the neoprene joint

During four exacting years, Foster Associates had substantially transformed the built landscape of work, and this demanding itinerary would culminate in 1971 with a commission that was due to become a landmark of contemporary architecture: the headqu

Built in 1971-1975 as headquarters for an insurance company that had decided to move out of London, the futuristic, sinuous, dark glass skin of Willis Faber & Dumas fitted with astonishing ease into the medieval core of Ipswich, a small town in t

While the genial amoeba of Willis Faber & Dumas was extruded vertically from the ground print, Norman Foster experimented with horizontal extrusion in smaller buildings. This process, which, through a repetitive structure, rationalised constructi

The coordination of structure and services in containers of rigorous modularity and immaculate detailing had been the main constructional challenge of the Foster team during the sixties, and this interest in the flexible fast-track shed was extended

To many, the Sainsbury Centre for the Visual Arts is the ultimate well-serviced box, and the climax of all the experiments undertaken by Foster in the previous ten years, from Reliance and Olsen to IBM and SAPA; to others, this monumental framed cont

In the late seventies, the egalitarian utopias of the sixties had begun to wither; the hopes of a new society finally freed from the strictures of need, which were bred by prosperity, faded when faced with the harsh realities of the economic stagnati

After Willis Faber and the Sainsbury Centre, Foster’s acclaim brought a stream of public and private commissions, most of which failed to materialise. The often trivial graphic expression of these missed chances show the difficulty to evaluate the un

Between the completion of the Sainsbury Centre and the start of the Hong Kong project, Foster benefited from the relaxation of commitments to undertake a personal project, a house for himself in Hampstead. The design, of which full size mockups were

In the year 1979, the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank made a double gesture of confidence: in the future of the colony after its devolution to China, building 100.000 square metres of lavish office space in the city; and in Norman Foster, commissioning t

Fifteen years after completing Reliance Controls, Norman Foster returned to Swindon with another industrial commission, but this time executed in a bold expressionist language which offers a strong contrast with the confident restraint of the earlier

In a conventional labelling of decades, if the sixties were sociological and the seventies technologically minded, the eighties brought a new awareness of history and the city. This shift of orientation is transparently exemplified in Foster’s career

Stansted airport (1981-1991) takes from Renault the modular forest of masts, and from Hong Kong the shafts of four cylindrical steel pillars; but the exposed fan of cables of the distribution centre is here a knot of braces that hold together the bra

Both Frankfurt and the BBC were significant projects that never reached completion; but whereas the indoor athletics stadium, winner of a restricted competition in 1981, substantially develops and extends the concept of the Sainsbury Centre, the new

On a first approach, Nîmes Carré (1984-1993) is a slender reinterpretation of the classical temple in front of it: a glass box with a steel portico. But the modern translation of the Roman monument is subtly shifted to enter into a dialogue with the

Elected to the Royal Academy in 1983, two years later Foster was commissioned to improve the exhibition galleries on top of Burlington House. Although limited in scope, this project was deeply significant for the importance of the institution involve

After finishing Hong Kong in 1986, the second half of the eighties was a busy period for Foster Associates. The development of Stansted, Nîmes and Sackler coincided with a new bunch of commissions for commercial offices and large scale urban plans fu

Having built many distinguished office buildings, Foster Associates were considered specialists in the type, and the booming eighties brought several commissions. After the cancellation of the BBC project, the Mexican Televisa headquarters would have

Foster has never been a residential architect proper. After the first houses with Team 4, most of his domestic commissions have been for powerful clients, like the Mayor of Nîmes or the owner of the Century Tower; the project for himself of 1978 was

Like Stansted Airport, the American Air Museum at Duxford took ten years from design to completion, and in this case no environmental debates could be blamed for the delay. Perhaps because of its protracted development, this museum has not been fully

Transformed into a global office, Foster Associates began to have a large proportion of its workload abroad. Hong Kong had opened up the Pacific Rim, and Nîmes would be the first significant commitment on the other side of the Channel, soon to be fol

Hong Kong había en efecto transformado a Foster en una empresa multinacional, y cuando en 1996 el equipo del lejano oriente regresó a Londres después de terminar el banco, de inmediato se empezó a preparar una nueva oficina (que se construiría al lad

Whereas the office buildings of the 80s were fast track jobs for British and Japanese developers, in the 90s Foster was able to build energy-conscious working spaces for German and French public clients. In these slowly developed commissions he regai

Winners of competitions in 1989, 1990 and 1991, Cranfield, Cambridge and Camus are three educational buildings that share expressive roofs, climate-conscious detailing and a convivial understanding of learning. Gravid with light references and wise i

After the towers of Hong Kong and Tokyo, the Commerzbank headquarters in Frankfurt is Foster’s third high rise building and, with 53 storeys and 300 metres, the tallest in Europe (Century rose to 20 storeys, and Hong Kong to 28, 35 and 41). In the of

In 1992, Foster and Partners won the competition to build a new airport for Hong Kong. To be placed, like Osaka’s Kansai (whose competition Foster lost to Piano in 1988) on an artificial island, the huge building was to be the largest construction pr

Nîmes y Sackler, both finished in the early 90s, had proved that Foster could not be pigeon-holed as a technically minded architect best reserved for office buildings and factories, skyscrapers and airports. In these historically delicate environment

After the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989, German unification followed, and soon the decision was taken to move the capital back to Berlin. The old Reichstag (a clumsy 19th century building damaged during the war, and scantily used since, associated

The experience gained in the Sackler Galleries and the Reichstag enabled Foster to help museums with the predicament of growth within historical buildings. Indeed, the redevelopment of London’s British Museum (won in a competition in 1994) and the ex

Concept-designed between 1993 and 1995, these landmark buildings share a preference for almond shapes and tapered volumes, and a simplistic belief in the ability of the curve to call attention and raise the symbolic profile of a structure. In the Val

Before 1996, Foster’s symbolic presence in London had been limited: a luminous gap in the Royal Academy and a clearing job at the British Museum. Most of the other works were offices of varying quality: from the laconic elegance of his own office, th

Foster and Partners could now be described alternatively as the more prestigious large practice or as the larger prestigious practice in the world. Either way, its central role places a heavy responsibility on its shoulders. For several consecutive y

Foster’s most visionary projects have arisen out of his collaboration and friendship with Buckminster Fuller. In 1971 they designed two bubbles that never materialised, a subterranean theatre and a total environment office that inspired Willis Faber;

The demanding rigour and visual restraint of Foster’s architecture has often prompted the practice to design non-proprietary systems and products; and in some cases this attention to detail has been channelled through commissions for serial objects o

Some of the more seminal works of Foster in the 90s deal with movement, and among those, perhaps the more inspiring are those on the knifeedge between architecture and civil engineering: landing pads and flying roofs, road bridges and railways tunnel

If the planning of cities, the design of objects and the engineering of infrastructures legitimately extend the limits of architecture, landscape brings them all together in the very core of a discipline concerned with the built environment as the me