Living Architectures

Norman Foster with Frédéric Migayrou

Frédéric Migayrou: Norman Foster, you have worked on many types of programs, including airports, transportation systems, museums and universities, and for each of them, the question of locality is always present. What is the relationship between the global vision of the architecture that you develop, and the specificity of each project’s context?

Norman Foster: Trends are global in cities. For example, the relationship between mobility and public space – whether it’s Seoul, Boston or Madrid – the trends we are witnessing are the same. We are seeing road systems being either partly buried or diverted, and more space given over to people and nature. But what happens on the ground relates to the particular place; every city is different. It’s the same with an individual building. It has components which come from all over the world, but the way they come together responds to a specific brief. The challenge is to maximise the differences, rather than encouraging homogeneity. The answer is to encourage local DNA and culture, to be sensitive to them, and to have the best of both worlds. In short, each project should be of its place.

How did this vision of architectural and urban complexity first take shape? You often mention your discovery of the technical complexities of locomotives and aircraft at a young age through drawings in Eagle magazine, or your exposure to Manchester’s architecture, for instance the Barton Arcade and Alfred Waterhouse’s Town Hall, or Owen Williams’s Daily Express Building. How was your original understanding of architecture arrived at?

As a child, I was drawn to magazines and books which showed the cutting-edge technologies of the time, with drawings that revealed their inner components. When I made my first drawings at the Manchester School of Architecture, I chose not to restrict myself to just plans, sections and elevations, which are two-dimensional. I was also taking those buildings apart, seeing how they work and drawing them three-dimensionally. While my drawings have become more sophisticated, they still seek to explain the inner workings and systems of a building.

After receiving your master’s degree, you obtained a scholarship to study at Yale University, where you met Richard Rogers. The influence of architects such as Louis Kahn, Paul Rudolph and Serge Chermayeff was to prove decisive, as was your discovery during a trip to California of new construction principles at the Case Study Houses designed by Craig Ellwood and by Charles and Ray Eames, and also in Ezra Ehrenkrantz’s School Construction Systems Development (SCSD). How do you view these early influences today?

I think influences can either be conscious or subconscious – and we’re all a product of them. If I think about my first experience of going into the School of Architecture, which was located in the Louis Kahn Building at Yale University Art Gallery, I recall the famous picture of Kahn looking up at the diagrid ceiling. That ceiling could never have happened without the pioneering work of Richard Buckminster Fuller, one of my early mentors, whom I later went on to work with on several projects during my early career.

Another influence at that time were the Case Study Houses, which had an extraordinary glamour to them. They were quite utilitarian, using standard off-the-peg items, but these were being put together to create beautiful architecture. During the early days of practice, our work on school systems owed a debt to the California SCSD pioneered by Ezra Ehrenkrantz, which was only made possible because he had been in the United Kingdom immediately after the Second World War, when schools were being industrialised. So, there are always these links to the past but, of course,

We are all a product of influences that can inspire our work. Creatively, we might be consciously aware of them, or they might be buried in our subconscious. They can be people (parents, partners in life or work, collaborators, mentors, writers) or places (cities, squares, boulevards, parks, bridges, buildings) or objects (machines, vehicles, aircraft, sculptures, paintings). All that is tangible in the visual world is subject to design, by nature or by humans. Which is why I see no distinction between the creative worlds of objects, art and architecture – for me they are all one seamless whole.