🇬🇧Norman Foster

Norman Foster grew up in working-class Levenshulme in Manchester, the son of a shop manager. He left school at sixteen and worked in the Manchester City Treasurer's department before doing National Service in the Royal Air Force. He was twenty-one before he went to Manchester University to study architecture — a late start that he made up for with the ferocity of his ambition. A scholarship to Yale, where he met Richard Rogers, was followed by their return to London and the founding of Team 4 in 1963 — a practice that included Rogers's wife Su and Foster's wife Wendy. The Reliance Controls factory in Swindon (1967), Team 4's most significant project, established the template for what would become High-Tech architecture: an open-plan industrial shed with an expressed steel frame, democratic in its erasure of hierarchy between managers and workers, elegant in its reduction of the structure to its essential components.

After Team 4 dissolved, Foster founded Foster Associates (now Foster + Partners) in 1967. The practice's defining characteristic — still evident in every project across more than half a century — is the integration of engineering intelligence with architectural vision. Foster has always believed that the structural and mechanical systems of a building should be visible, legible, and beautiful, rather than hidden behind suspended ceilings and cladding panels. His buildings celebrate the means of their construction in the way that Gothic cathedrals celebrate the logic of the pointed arch and flying buttress. The difference is that Foster's structural members are steel and glass rather than stone, and the forces they express are industrial rather than gravitational.

The project that first drew international attention was the headquarters of Willis Faber & Dumas in Ipswich (1975): a low-rise office building whose facade was an unbroken curtain of dark glass that followed the curving street line, reflecting the historic town around it. During the day it was almost invisible; at night, when the interior was lit, it became transparent, revealing the floors and circulation routes within. The building's escalators, planted roof, and swimming pool announced a client-centered generosity in workplace design that was radical in 1975 and remains influential today. The Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation headquarters in Hong Kong (1985) was the most expensive building in the world when it was completed: a 47-story tower suspended from eight groups of steel masts, with no internal structural columns, the floor plates hung from giant trusses. The result was a building that could be read from the street like a diagram of its own engineering — and that provided, at its base, a public atrium open to the city below.

The Reichstag in Berlin (1999) was the project that gave Foster a place in democratic history. Tasked with rebuilding the German parliament after reunification, he proposed adding a glass dome above the debating chamber — a dome that would be open to the public, allowing citizens to walk above the heads of their elected representatives, looking down through a glass oculus into the chamber below. The symbolism was exact: government visible and accountable, the public literally above the state. The dome has been visited by more than ten million people and is the most photographed building in Germany. In the same year Foster won the Pritzker Prize.

30 St Mary Axe in London — universally known as "the Gherkin" — opened in 2003 and immediately became the most recognizable new building in Britain. Its tapering glass form, covered in a diagrid of steel members that eliminate the need for corner columns, was designed using computer modeling to maximize natural ventilation and minimize energy use. The building rotates as it rises, each floor turned slightly from the one below, creating six triangular "light wells" that allow daylight to penetrate to all parts of the interior. It is a building in which the aerodynamic and the aesthetic are the same thing — a form of thinking that Foster has called "design ecology."

Foster + Partners, now one of the largest architectural practices in the world with over 1,500 staff, has completed more than 1,000 projects in over 75 countries: airports in Hong Kong, Beijing, and Mexico City; stadiums in Wembley and Lusail; museums, hospitals, libraries, bridges, and entire urban districts. The Millau Viaduct in southern France (2004), a 2.5-kilometre road bridge across the Tarn Valley, briefly the world's tallest bridge structure, shows the range of his ambition: not a building at all, but infrastructure at the scale of landscape, as elegantly engineered as his most refined interior. Norman Foster's career is a demonstration that the impulse to make things beautiful and the impulse to make things work are not in tension but are, at their best, the same impulse expressed in two different registers.