Lord Norman Foster has been announced as the recipient of the 2025 Andrée Putman Lifetime Achievement Award by the Créateurs Design Awards. The award, now it its fifth edition, recognizes Foster's significant contributions to urban design and the environmental movement within architecture. This recognition highlights his longstanding influence and contributions to the field since founding Foster + Partners in 1967. The award ceremony will take place in Paris on January 18th, 2025.
The Norman Foster Institute is now accepting applications for its Programme on Sustainable Cities, taking place in Madrid from January to December 2025.
The Programme on Sustainable Cities blends hands-on experience with academic insights from the Norman Foster Foundation’s global network of experts, led by Co-Directors Norman Foster and Kent Larson. Each year, participants will immerse themselves in three pilot cities, engaging directly with local planners and managers. The 2025 academic year will focus on African cities, one of the most challenging territories that also presents one of the greatest opportunities for urban development.
The European Cultural Centre (ECC), a non-profit organization dedicated to fostering cultural exchanges on an international scale, showcased its sixth edition of the Time Space Existence architecture exhibition alongside this year's Venice Architecture Biennale. The 2023 installment was centered on the theme of sustainability in its various forms, encompassing subjects related to migration, digital building technologies and material research, future urban developments, and housing, bringing together architects, designers, artists, academics, and photographers from 52 different countries.
Through diverse mediums and perspectives, participants have explored the philosophical concepts of Time, Space, and Existence. With a total of 217 projects on display, the exhibition is held at Palazzo Bembo, Palazzo Mora, and the Marinaressa Gardens in Venice, throughout the six-month duration of the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale, running from May 20th to November 26th, 2023. Focusing also on emerging young architects, designers, and researchers, the 2023 edition of the exhibition is a proactive endeavor to reimagine alternative lifestyles and reconceptualize architecture within the contemporary landscape.
Since the launch of the Norman Foster Foundation, its mission has been to promote interdisciplinary thinking and research to help new generations to anticipate the future. In order to respond to the growing importance of urbanization and its challenges, the Foundation is now embarking on a new initiative addressed to those who wish to improve the quality of life in cities worldwide, the Norman Foster Institute.
Its first program, On Sustainable Cities, will combine practical on-site experience with academic input from the foundation’s network of international experts, using the most up-to-date digital tools. Each year, scholars will visit three pilot cities to engage directly with their planners and managers.
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?”
Currently at 103 million, the number of people forcibly displaced from their homes is continuously growing. Many seek shelter in settlements that are meant to be temporary, but where displaced people end up living years, even decades.
The Norman Foster Foundation and Holcim, global leader in sustainable building solutions, came together to form a response to this problem based on two firm beliefs: everyone has the right to a home, and everyone should have access to sustainable building.
During the 2023 Architectural Biennale in Venice, Holcim and the Norman Foster Foundation will announce the start of their Essential Houses Research Project. Through this collaboration, the Norman Foster Foundation created necessary housing to give displaced communities safety, comfort, and welfare while allowing them to live in temporary settlements for over 20 years. To make sustainable buildings accessible to everyone, Holcim constructed these necessary homes using various green products, such as Elevate Insulation Boards and ECOPact low-carbon concrete.
Norman Foster Foundation and Arup office in Berlin schemed a master plan for Kharkiv, Ukraine, to guide future urban regulations and prepare professionals for the city's reconstruction. In collaboration with a local advisory board, the outline is defined by a series of pilot projects to develop aspects such as heritage, infrastructure, and rivers. The initiative follows a request from the Kharkiv Mayor to the Foster Foundation through the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, weeks after the Ukraine War started in February 2022.
Norman Foster met with the Mayor of Kharkiv, Ihor Terekhov, on Monday to discuss the city's rebuilding, following discussions at the 2nd UN Forum of Mayors in Geneva. Since the onset of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the city of Kharkiv suffered significant damage due to heavy shelling, losing much of its infrastructure, including housing, hospitals, schools, cultural institutions, and historic buildings. The second-largest city in Ukraine is already planning its rebuilding, with Norman Foster undertaking the task of bringing together the "best minds" to envision the city's future.
Earlier this month, the Norman Foster Foundation opened its doors in central Madrid. Inhabiting in an old residential palace, and having undergone extensive renovation works since, the Foundation have also constructed their own contemporary courtyard pavilion. Housing a treasure trove of artefacts from Lord Foster's personal collection, the structure—which is shaped like the wing of an aircraft—also exhibits a newly restored 1927 Avions Voisin C7 originally owned by Le Corbusier.
Last month the Norman Foster Foundation, created to promote "interdisciplinary thinking and research to help up-and-coming architects, designers and urbanists to anticipate the future," coincided the opening of its new Madrid-based headquarters with an international conference. Future is Now pulled together a broad collection of professionals—including Sir Jonathan Ive, Marc Newson, Olafur Eliasson, Maya Lin, Alejandro Aravena, and Luis Fernández-Galian—who addressed an audience of 1,800 (including 1,100 students) in the Spanish capital's Royal Theater.
Watch the conference in its entirety, or read a summary, after the break.
The Norman Foster Foundation has announced plans for its new Madrid-based headquarters to be opened in June this year, whose inauguration will be marked by the first session of the global forum Future is Now, addressing future social, economic and design concerns architecture will face. With the intersection of art, technology, and design, the Foundation facilitates multifaceted thinking and discourse among architects and designers. The opening of its new headquarters is a vital step in “establishing a world-class archive and inaugurating an international program of research, education, and interdisciplinary projects.”
According to the Foundation, “the decision to establish the Foundation as an independent entity, separate from the architectural practice of Foster + Partners, grew out of the perceived need for a permanent physical space that could house the Archive and study center, receive students and graduates, and present programs and projects."
Foster + Partners has unveiled designs for a droneport in Rwanda, proposed in an attempt to bring more efficient medical care and commercial delivery services to communities in Africa where there is a lack of infrastructure required to meet the population's needs.
"Just a third of Africans live within two kilometres of an all-season road," explains the press release. "It would require unprecedented levels of investment in roads and railways to catch up with the exponential growth in Africa’s population, which is set to double to 2.2 billion by 2050." Foster + Partners instead proposes to leap that development hurdle by making use of 21st century technology - namely drones.
