This is an edited excerpt by Philip Jodidio from TASCHEN’s upcoming title Norman Foster.
In a 2007 conference, Norman Foster stated: “As an architect you design for the present, with an awareness of the past, for a future which is essentially unknown." That talk was about the green agenda, which he termed the most important issue of the day, affirming that it is “not about fashion but about survival.” Admittedly, the rise in public interest in contemporary architecture that followed the creation of the Pritzker Prize in 1979 (Foster was the 1999 winner) has been focused on forms and personalities more than on substance. Philip Johnson, the first winner of the shiny award, made his view clear: “Architecture is art, nothing else.” Essays, magazines, and books have delighted in the foibles, verbal and sartorial, of celebrated architects, the hats, and eyeglasses of genius. Of course, figures like Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier did not wait for a prize to be famous, and it seems fitting that Wright’s literary alter-ego, Howard Roarke, would say: “Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist’s metaphysical value judgments." The modern architect/artist as demiurge, responsible for fashioning and maintaining the universe: “…how like an Angel in apprehension, how like a God?”
From Self-Reference to Inclusiveness
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The Centre Pompidou Debuts the Largest Retrospective of Norman Foster’s Work in ParisBut was any architect capable of resisting the underlying forces of modernity? What of the “awareness of the past” that Foster affirmed? Was that idea not swept aside more than a century ago by Le Corbusier’s Maison Dom-Ino (1912–16), with its tabula rasa of open-ended floors and slender columns? The removal of ornament and the introduction of industrial processes had the power to make modern architecture almost purely self-referential. What if the modern architect imagined not art, but, instead, the ex-nihilo creation of space itself? In the place of the richly storied heart of Paris, Le Corbusier’s Plan Voisin (1922–25) imagined a new city of 18 identical skyscrapers occupying 240 hectares of the Right Bank. There may be more than a bit of irony in the fact that Norman Foster proudly displays Le Corbusier’s iconic automobile, the Voisin C7 Lumineuse (1926), in his Madrid Foundation.
Though grids and modern materials are his forte, Foster also chose from the beginning of his career not to spin off empty space—his buildings are inhabited by a world of references and concerns; they flow and curve with their sites and their environment; they do not impose the barrenness of much modern architecture. Nor are Foster’s buildings imbued with the posturing gesticulation seen elsewhere. Their form and their substance are there for reasons that go far beyond contemporary economic constraints to reach back to the soul of architecture, to inclusiveness and responsibility, which equally reject sterility.
The largely productivist vision of modernity found a kind of romantic contradiction in such schools as Italian Futurism. Rejecting the “pensive immobility, ecstasy, and slumber” of the past, Futurism, instead, embraced the furious light and sound of the present and cried for a headlong plunge into the fiery unknown. “We declare that the splendor of the world has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing automobile with its bonnet adorned with great tubes like serpents with explosive breath ... a roaring motor car that seems to run on machine-gun fire—that is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace,” wrote Filippo Tommaso Marinetti in 1909.
In this volume, Norman Foster writes of the forces and themes that have shaped his career and his creativity, and in his words, there is the outline of a truly contemporary way of looking at architecture. He has taken from his own past (“Roots”) a fascination with space and the art of building. He has built on a world-straddling scale, from Los Angeles to Beijing, and nearly every point in-between—not in a cold, calculating mass production of empty space, but instead by informing himself and his architecture with such basics as a deep interest in how people get together and interact, how the presence and preservation of nature enriches and sustains life. From his early projects, such as his work for Fred Olsen, Foster challenged social hierarchies, willfully breaking down the architectural barriers between employers and the employed. His unrealized 1975 scheme for Gomera in the Canary Islands was no less than a fully developed blueprint for eco-tourism and development. In this, he seems much less a spokesman for any political philosophy than an enlightened observer of human interaction and the relations between the built and natural environments.
Bend it like a Nighthawk
A pilot of almost every imaginable flying machine, helicopters, gliders, and jets, Foster explains in these pages how his very first sketch imagined his position in an airplane cockpit (“Flight”). And from his experience, soaring through the air, he has surely retained the sense of lightness, the cloud-like hovering feeling of many of his buildings, but so, too, has he examined the material innovations that have allowed aeronautics to advance so rapidly and so far with an attentive eye. The foot of his Nomos table grips the ground like the landing pad of the Lunar Excursion Module and that, too, is no coincidence (“Making”). In the air and in his many automobiles, Norman Foster has embraced the beauty of speed and the machines that make it possible. Swept back like a Chrysler Airflow, folded like an F-117 Nighthawk, so much of his architecture is informed by the very real modernity of speed, and the designs that rapid movement imposes. Unlike Le Corbusier, and more like the Futurists, he sought the future, not in industrial repetition, but in speed and technology. He was always at ease with the past, drawing the old buildings of his native region as a young man, always noting where any kind of modernity could find its place.
One celebrated architect spoke in his own Pritzker acceptance speech of being jealous of the liberty of his friends who were artists. He did, indeed, create many sculptural and unexpected buildings that sought to claim artistic freedom for architecture itself. Foster, instead, has looked extensively into modern and contemporary art, seeing the movement captured in Brâncuşi’s Bird in Flight, so similar in its basic form to a stylized airplane propeller. He frequently collaborated with artists like Richard Long and Sol LeWitt, not seeking to imitate them, nor to compete with them, but rather to give them the natural places that they have assumed in his homes and buildings (“Art”). Foster is surely not the only contemporary architect to have a broad knowledge of art, or for that matter of machines, but he is one of the very few to render his thought process explicit, as he does in this book, illustrating works and connecting them to his architecture. The form of a dirigible thus approaches the skin of some of his buildings, even as powers and qualities developed in other domains are assimilated into his architecture as a source of enrichment and deeper connection to the real world.
Ripolin White Goes Green
The original Dom-Ino design was a radical exercise in simplification and reproducibility; it left room for nothing but economics and space. Le Corbusier, who like Foster was fascinated with machines and speed, went on to become more lyrical in his modernity with late works such as the Chapel of Notre-Dame du Haut (Ronchamp, 1955), perhaps contradicting the concept of the “machine à habiter.” Thoroughly contemporary in his process, Norman Foster is at the other end of the spectrum from the arid emptiness of endlessly repeated industrial forms painted in Ripolin white. Instead, he succeeds in fashioning modern shapes that are intrinsically informed by the world as we know it—from its social implications to technical and cultural ones.
What Foster calls the “green agenda” is a clear example of his approach. He does emphasize that throughout his career he has embraced environmental responsibility, but not for reasons of fashion nor even for compatibility with systemic requirements. From his years with Richard Buckminster Fuller, and even before, he took on an approach which is fundamentally inclusive and speaks to the green agenda quite simply because it is necessary to be aware of the impact of architecture on the world. Environmental awareness makes the people who use and are impacted by architecture healthier, more productive, and fundamentally happier. These words may sound cloyed, but like the social implications of architecture, they are deeply inscribed in what an architect can and should be able to do. For Foster, they have come naturally because his is an inclusive approach, one that looks above and beyond an imagined space to consider its use, its place in space and time, and its impact on the environment.
From his earliest work, Norman Foster has sought ways to make modern buildings physically fit into their environment, whether natural or urban. This is a matter of scale, color, and sensitivity that has frequently eluded other professionals in the “art of building,” in part because tabula rasa theories implied that a new building should define its own space rather than fitting into what already exists. By suggesting that the new somehow must supersede and replace all that went before, by setting aside the social and environmental functions of architecture, by looking only at building rather than the broader technical and artistic worlds, architects somehow lost their soul. This is why Foster matters.
Even as he traveled the world conceiving and supervising increasingly large projects, Norman Foster developed another parallel line of thinking, by no means unrelated to ideas employed elsewhere. Spending time in Switzerland, and in particular in St. Moritz, he worked on how a local tradition of building in wood, and often using larch shingles, could be adapted to modern architectural design and construction. His Chesa Futura is a case in point, blending into this mountain town as its shingles have turned gray with the normal weathering process, broadening the often small and closed wooden buildings of the Alpine past into a generous, modern, and efficient structure (“Alpine”). As it happens, the Engadine region of Switzerland, located close to both Italy and Austria, has long been a route of trade and culture. By no means as isolated as it might seem, this mountainous place is also one in which the architect is quite clearly at home.
Foster by Foster
In a modest way, the methods used by Norman Foster to work on this monograph reveal his approach. He drew every double page of the first volume Norman Foster Works, not once but usually several times, replacing and improving the image selection and size until he was satisfied. He wanted to explain his designs so that readers can understand them, just as this second book constituting the monograph reveals his sources of inspiration. Publications and other forms of representation of architecture often privilege a style or a kind of willful image management. Instead, here, the image emerges from a rather vast accumulation of choices, from a systematic revelation of real sources. Every image in this book was chosen and placed by Foster in a process very different from that of some other architects who are bent on giving the impression of artistic innovation—his buildings are not strokes of genius; rather, they emerge from the context of his life and times. Those elements are so carefully and fully integrated that their individual presence almost requires the explanation contained in this book. The Ring Building of Apple Park carries within its form the unstated echo of a circle by Richard Long, like the one that graced the rear wall of Foster’s La Voile residence in Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, France.
There is no denying that there is an aesthetic element in Foster’s architecture, even in its lightness and frequent simplicity. There are recurring shapes and solutions, usually dictated by forces that go beyond appearance. An airport design implies highly codified technical requirements, but that may be precisely where the architect shows an unusual mastery—in giving an aesthetic life and presence to a structure that must already respond to hundreds if not thousands of requirements, ranging from fire safety to energy consumption and traffic flow.
To Synthesize, To Assimilate
Norman Foster’s chosen means of communication is the sketch—done rapidly or with more time and care, his sketches reveal the extent of his exploration of every detail of his architecture. Much as he pondered and developed the layout of Works, he keeps at it until the pieces fall into place and the end result becomes worthy of his own acceptance. The word “genius” is overused and perhaps misunderstood, but in the case of “star” architects it has come to imply a kind of lightening vision of a grand new form. Foster surely conceives many of his buildings in their larger outline very clearly in early sketches, but a reason for his great success is also his ability to delegate and enlarge the scope of his working capacity. From the modest beginnings of Team 4 to the very large systems of Foster + Partners, Norman Foster has evolved in his own methods of oversight and input, calling on trusted colleagues to advance his ideas, but also being willing to listen. Successfully growing a practice has not been a given for every architect who started out as modestly as Foster did. At his age and with his experience, he has not lost the ability to bend and to change course according to circumstances and trusted advice. The systems he has put in place and instilled at Foster + Partners assure that his approach to architecture in its most inclusive form will continue.
The “stars” of architecture have been credited with many qualities. Their romanticized creative gestures seem almost pure and “god-given” if they are not seen as the acts of superior beings, givers of form in the sense of the demiurge. Frank Gehry was right to point to the freedom of artists—without practical constraint, they can form materials and images almost freely, but that kind of abstracted spark seems to be a false premise in architecture. A building must stand up and serve a purpose even beyond inspiration to viewers. To exist, it has to meet requirements not only of function but of cost, sometimes at the expense of any real creativity. Rather than generating an abstract, personal work of art when he designs a building, Norman Foster takes in vast amounts of information and admits sources and feelings that go beyond those of the builder to truly include the user. He and indeed his firms have been able to open their minds in an inclusive way to create buildings that do not stand alone, but stand in harmony with their surroundings, even when they are taller or more modern than their neighbors. This book and its many illustrations speak to the vast variety of inspirations and thoughts that go into Foster buildings, and how, at the end, they retain a modern presence and personality that is not rendered dull by the variety of assimilated sources. Those attentive to Norman Foster’s career and publications will note that some of these comparisons and ideas have been developed before, but never in such a comprehensive and extensive publication.
On a more personal level, Foster exudes a natural energy and an ability to communicate that mirror his voracious capacity to assimilate the many influences that he has chosen to incorporate into his architecture. He seems to work without stopping, though he has long since earned the possibility to rest. He has a single-minded devotion to the tasks at hand, which he inevitably takes on, not in a haphazard or overly rapid manner, but with the required attention that goes right down to small details. In his distinctive handwriting, he communicates frequently in full sentences, rarely with shortened forms—this is unusual in our hurried times, and perhaps a reminiscence of the period when he was schooled.
Awareness of the Past
Foster’s practices have produced many significant architects who went on to their own productive careers. It might not be said that Foster has a specific style, except for his interest in the environment and his very comprehensive, extensive awareness and incorporation of the forces that have driven modern technology (particularly those associated with speed) and modern culture, from the Futurist Boccioni to the master of Pop Art, Andy Warhol—two of the artists represented in his collections. It is by integrating such a variety of elements, most prominently his concern for the environment and for alleviating social disequilibrium, that Foster stands out. Nor does he stop at designing airports and towers, of course. The pedestrian experience of moving through central London, for example, has been transformed by his renovation of Trafalgar Square and by the construction of the Millennium Bridge from St. Paul’s Cathedral to the Tate Modern (“Cities”). Apparently simple in their actual presence, almost invisible to those who did not know Trafalgar Square before, these projects were the result of an enormous investment of time and effort. The British Museum and the Royal Academy live and breathe again after long periods of successive architectural intrusions, thanks to his spirit of openness and respect for the past. This respect extends even to such a historically complex building as the Reichstag in Berlin: seat of power, symbol of much unwanted history, yet totally awakened and brightened by Lord Foster’s touch. A glazed dome, where the people can literally stand above their representatives and which glows from within at night, exemplifies how to retain an “awareness of the past,” while addressing the present and the future.
It is by accepting all the positive influences, all the potential values of each project that Foster has made a place for himself as the most significant living architect. He has always felt clearly that nature (daylight and respect for the environment) is part of what architecture must include (“Nature”), but he has gone further—to bring the inspiration of machines and art into his buildings. If the Futurists imagined riding a roaring fiery machine into the future, Foster, instead, assimilated the presence of airplanes, cars, space craft, and other aspects of modern technology by making many of their ideas, forms, and materials an integral part of his work. This assimilation goes hand in hand with his interest in the environment and in the urban settings of his work—the modern building, in his hands, is not an object divorced from its time and place. It is part of both.
Today, Norman Foster participates in ventures to empower poor countries with energy sources and other technical solutions, such as drone delivery of medicines in Africa. From myriad sources of inspiration and information, he has been at the commands as coherent, fully contemporary buildings have emerged. These are much more “complete” buildings than any driven exploration of personal artistic flair would permit. He is apt to be sure that his sketches carry his trademark “NF” signature, but walk from the National Gallery directly into Trafalgar Square without risking life and limb and remember that this, too, is his architecture. His museum renovations from Boston to Madrid inevitably express a will to reinstate the former entrances, to make the old buildings communicate and fit with the new. There is an “NF” carved somewhere, surely, but this architecture also exists and functions properly because it does not bear an unsufferable weight of ego. The man does have an ego, and a very strong will to get things done, but also a gift of openness, which is the secret of his success.
Sources
The buildings published in this monograph are by no means the work of a single person, of course, but of hundreds, those who have worked with his firms, most prominently Foster + Partners today, and their many suppliers. This architecture is also the fruit of encounters with exceptional clients like Robert and Lisa Sainsbury or Steve Jobs, and of an ability to successfully navigate the complexities of local bureaucracies and to control costs while still producing memorable, successful buildings. From his first drawing of an airplane to the Cockpit in the garden of the Creek Vean House (1966), Norman Foster has somehow woven his own sources of inspiration into his architecture, no matter how complex and vast it became. The essential trait that he bestowed on his buildings is that deep inclusiveness that admits art, society, and nature without imposing purely formal codes in any systematic way. These buildings make sense in the broadest, most contemporary way—they were ahead of their time when nobody, or almost nobody, was interested in the environment, and they still are. Simply put, his buildings are places where users and visitors are comfortable. They are responsible in terms of their location and the environment. This is the legacy of Lord Foster of Thames Bank, and an ambition for other architects to equal, even if the future remains “essentially unknown.”
The Centre Pompidou in Paris is currently showcasing the most extensive overview of Norman Foster's work over the last sixty years, on display until 7 August 2023. Encompassing an exhibition space of nearly 2,200 square meters, the retrospective delves into the different stages of the celebrated architect's career. Among the featured highlights are significant projects such as the headquarters of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation (Hong Kong, 1979-1986), the Carré d'Art (Nîmes, 1984-1993), the Hong Kong International Airport (1992-1998), and Apple Park (Cupertino, United States, 2009-2017). On that occasion, Taschen released an XXL monograph titled "Norman Foster: Complete Works 1965–Today." This publication, spanning two volumes, encapsulates Foster's lifelong accomplishments and represents the first comprehensive collection of his entire body of work in a single edition of such grand magnitude.
