“Norman Foster’s buildings are not mere strokes of genius; they emerge from the context of his life and times.” Philip Jodidio
The Fruit of Modernity By Philip Jodidio
Previous spread: Great Court, British Museum, London, 1994–2000. The 478-tonne steel roof structure, which supports 315 tonnes of glass, was built like a giant jigsaw puzzle and creates the largest enclosed public square in Europe. © Nigel Young/Foster + Partners.
Opposite: Norman Foster’s concept sketch of 30 St. Mary Axe seen behind St. Helen’s, Bishopsgate, London, 1999. © Norman Foster. Norman Foster with a copy of Networks, the second volume of his monograph containing eight essays he wrote detailing his personal approach and inspirations. Chemosphere House, Los Angeles, 2023.
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 But 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? Though grids and modern materials are his forte, Foster also chooses 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. In the 2nd volume of this book, 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 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. And from his experience, 133