‘The only constant is change’

Philip Jodidio

It is difficult to understand how some architects emerge from their profession to become the inventors and leaders who make perceptions about design, construction, aesthetics and, finally, architecture itself evolve. A select few set patterns followed or imitated by others. It is indeed rare to come across a single figure who has not only designed and built significant projects across the world but has also been able to firmly control increasingly large offices. Norman Foster is such an architect, one who has changed the profession, built an office that has nearly 1,800 employees with nineteen studios worldwide, and maintained the curiosity and drive that have characterised him since his early years.

Norman Foster was born in 1935 in Reddish, north of Stockport, in Greater Manchester. He grew up in a working-class environment, first exposed to engineering and design by his father’s work as a machine painter for the electrical engineers Metropolitan-Vickers. He left school at sixteen and worked as a clerk at Manchester City Hall. After completing his military service in the Royal Air Force in 1953, he became an assistant to the contracts manager at the architectural firm John Beardshaw and Partners (Manchester). His aptitude for drawing earned him a position in the firm’s drawing department. Funding his studies with part-time work, Foster studied from 1956 at the University of Manchester’s School of Architecture and City Planning.

Foster is unusual in that he has consistently sought to identify the forces that played on him and influenced his sensibility and creativity. Although many architects would not cite such factors, the influences of art and nature are two important and early parts of his thought process. He explains:

‘Growing up in a semi-industrial suburb of Manchester, I discovered the work of the artist L.S. Lowry, whose paintings seemed like the very essence of a Northern urbanity with their long lines of brick row houses interspersed with factories and chapels – all without a trace of greenery. This early interest would develop into a lifelong fascination with issues of the city. But that background also provoked an appreciation of the countryside and nature – my escape route by bicycle at weekends was to discover the lush countryside of Cheshire and the Peak District of Derbyshire. I loved the contrast between these two worlds of nature and urbanity – and I still do.’1

To this day, Norman Foster keeps an urban view by Lowry near his bed.

The connectiveness of things

Foster graduated from the University of Manchester in 1961, receiving a Henry Fellowship to continue his studies at Yale University, where he met Richard Rogers. His time at Yale was seminal in more than one way. Robert A.M. Stern, a former dean of the Yale School of Architecture (1998–2016), wrote, ‘Foster’s decision to go to Yale was not easily arrived at. But he found Yale to be a liberating place, alive to the possibilities of architecture as an art and to the cross-currents of prevailing styles, ideologies, and passions.’2 Foster’s experience in the United States helped to awaken his remarkable awareness of the connectiveness of things. ‘America also presented a rich imagery of artefacts, which continue to fascinate me,’ he says. ‘The juxtaposition of the Airstream caravan, Ford station wagon and Colorado wilderness alongside the Apollo 17 module, moon buggy and lunar landscape is evocative of autonomy and liberation – a short thirty-year hop in time between the earthbound and a 239,000-mile [385,000-kilometre] leap into space. Different constraints and different responses, the smooth wrap-around envelope of the Airstream in contrast with a spindly articulated aesthetic of the module. There are some obvious links here to our work with Buckminster Fuller on autonomous dwellings.’3 In 1994, he also stated, ‘Yale opened my eyes and my mind. In the process I discovered myself. Anything positive that I have achieved as an architect is linked in some way to my Yale experience.’4

The right stuff

Returning to England, Norman Foster was one of the founding partners of Team 4 together with his Yale classmate Richard Rogers, and two sisters who were also architects, Wendy Cheesman (who became Wendy Foster in 1964), and Georgie Wolton. Although it was short-lived (1963–67), Team 4 set in motion many of the themes that re-emerged in the later work of Foster. One of their projects, the Reliance Controls Factory (Swindon, UK, 1965–66), announces an integrated approach not only to the technical, programmatic requirements of the client, but also provides an innovative approach to social issues. This points in an active way to one unusual strength of Foster – the continuity of his organisational and design patterns, but also of his points of focus, be they material or immaterial. He and his wife created the firm Foster Associates in 1967, just after the dissolution of Team 4. Today, Foster seeks to link that period to the current, much larger firm Foster + Partners:

I am never without my sketchbook and pencil, so drawing and writing is a way of life. For me, design starts with a sketch, which may look like the result of sudden inspiration but is likely to follow a total immersion in the issues leading to it. Someone once said that if I am asked a question then I will answer with a sketch. I admit to sometimes finding the drawn image faster and more to the point than articulating words. It can be part of a process of self-interrogation – making the imagination visible through the power of a line. The line may be the hasty, spontaneous scribble or the longer and more deliberate process of drawing with pencil, ink and colour. The pencil, as a tool, was once as indispensable to the process of design as today’s computer. However, no machine is able to replicate the tactile pleasure in the movement and friction between a pencil and the surface of a clean sheet of paper – I find that one of the most human and joyful of sensations.

Norman Foster