Taller, higher, bigger, Foster: Norman FOster interviewed by The Guardian

architect/artist: Norman Foster
interview title: Taller, higher, bigger, Foster
interviews compilation no: T-39
interview format: Text
date: 24 October 2005
appeared in: The Guardian
interviewer: Jonathan Glancey
photo by: Herbert Knosowski/AP

courtesy: http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2005/oct/24/architecture

Interview Details:

(images on top) 

(Dome of the Berlin Reichstag and design for Hearst Tower, New York 

by Norman Foster. Photograph: Herbert Knosowski/AP)

Norman Foster may be 70, but he shows no sign of flagging. Jonathan Glancey meets the world's most prolific - and ambitious - architect



Norman Foster stands on the shoulders of ... well, Norman Foster, really. He is the world's most famous and most productive architect. A giant. From a modest working-class background, he has risen to the highest ranks of professional and social esteem. Knighted and awarded the Order of Merit, he has won many of the world's top architectural and cultural prizes. If he were a military man, his decorations would trip him up as he walked.

Instead, he glides quietly into view in his great modern mill of an office on the south bank of the Thames between Battersea and Albert bridges. Dapper in cord suit, black polo neck and loafers, this keen pilot and skier wears his 70 years lightly. The first thing he wants to talk about is his latest toy, a remote-controlled model aircraft designed to fly indoors. "I've crashed it a few times," he says, "and have just about got the hang of landing it." As well he might: Foster's over-the-shop penthouse may not be as big as his work-in-progress, Terminal 3 of Beijing Capital International Airport, but there is enough space to land a model aircraft.

He's spending more time thinking about the Beijing terminal, though. "It's the largest covered structure ever built," he says. "There are 40,000 workers on site, working eight-hour shifts around the clock. Construction began on April 6 2004 and will be complete on December 31 2007, well in time for the 2008 Beijing Olympics."

The roof of the dragon-like structure covers a space 3.25km long by 785m wide. A train will connect various parts of the terminal, along with 175 escalators, 173 lifts and 437 travelators. By 2020, it is estimated, 55 million people will pass through each year.

"To get an idea of the scale," says Foster, "imagine Heathrow terminals 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 together under one roof and then add an extra 17% of floor space. It's so big that in certain lights you can't see one end of building from the other."

Foster has every last detail of this colossus at his fingertips. He loves aircraft; he loves flying. Since his National Service days with the RAF, he has loved the architecture of aircraft hangars, and ways in which the heavyweight art of architecture might learn from the latest lightweight technologies and materials. His Sainsbury Centre for the Visual Arts in Norwich, completed in 1978, is the most exquisite hangar yet built. Ever since, Foster's architecture has reached for the sky. His ambition and workload, too.

The Victorian architect Augustus Pugin, who worked himself into the grave at 40, once described himself as a "such a locomotive, being always flying about". Foster might describe himself as a jet fighter. He is unable to keep still, and ready to scramble to wherever a new project is rising: Sydney, New York, Malaysia, Kazakhstan. But, where Pugin refused to take on an assistant - "I would kill him in a week" - Foster has some 600 colleagues. His key partners, including Spencer de Grey and David Nelson, have been with him for more than 30 years, working on landmark structures that include Berlin's Reichstag building, the Swiss Re "Gherkin" in London, the Greater London Authority's City Hall, Chek Lap Kok airport in Hong Kong, the Nîmes Médiathèque, the Millau viaduct ... When you are such a global force, does the idea of locale still mean anything? "Wherever we work," Foster says, "we have a presence, whether in site huts or in the offices of engineers or contractors. We are very aware of conditions on the ground."

Yes, but do Foster designs respond to local architectural culture, precedent, history, sense of place? "We take the lead with design," he says emphatically, adding: "If there is an opportunity, without compromise or pastiche, to add something local to a building in such a way that it has a worthwhile impact on the subconscious ..." And then, uncharacteristically for such a precise talker, Foster's thought tails off. He thinks for a second, re-ignites, and tells me, instead, about the structure of the new Beijing terminal. "If I could show you the superb steelwork, the great columns defined by subtle compound curves, I think you would be impressed. These come from the experience the Chinese have in shipbuilding. They are great shipbuilders."

This is Foster in Foster World. He has always wanted to create buildings informed by the structure, logic and beauty of bridges and machinery. One of the first architectural prizes he won was for a working drawing of a windmill. Recently, when I asked him if he had ever been a railway enthusiast, he faxed me a drawing of a Royal Scot 4-6-0 thundering past what I take to be his childhood home in Levenshulme, which backed on to the railway south of Manchester. In designing an ultramodern building for a modernising China, he has no intention of drawing on that country's antique design traditions, but on its young industrial crafts, technologies and engineering processes.

There are some nods to a more venerable culture. "As you pass along the terminal," he says, "the walls and ceilings change from red to yellow, borrowing from traditional Chinese colour schemes." The precedent for the Beijing terminal lies, though, in Foster's earlier work. "It's an extension and development of our previous designs for Chep Lap Kok airport, Hong Kong, and the new terminal at Stansted."

In this sense, too, Foster is much like the design engineers he admires, refining ideas over decades, rather than floundering around in search of fashionable theories. Many of his buildings are exciting, like the curvaceous Surrey headquarters of car-maker McLaren, yet the best have been the result of rigorous design programmes and engineering logic. Less successful are those where form has been allowed to win over intellectual rigour (London's City Hall), or those built for developers as if extruded from a Foster production line, like the Sainsbury's headquarters at London's Holborn Circus.

Foster likes to talk in facts, and about things that excite him. China excites him because of the speed with which it is changing. "It has taken 50 years for Heathrow to grow to its present scale," he says. "In Beijing, the process will have been completed in less than five. Here is a society changing by the power of 10." Which makes the technocrat in Foster impatient. "Take Terminal 5 at Heathrow. The inquiry took longer to reach its inevitable conclusion than the terminal will have taken to build. We waste so much time, money and energy delaying projects, leaving them for the next generation to deal with."

He refuses to bring politics into his business. "I am neither judge nor jury in such matters," is all he will say. He will not comment on the political or business cock-ups that have beset progress on the new Wembley Stadium, another of his designs. "It will be ready, and it will live up to expectations," he says.

Foster does, though, express concern about Britain's lackadaisical attitude to planning. He sits on a Thames Gateway think-tank with, among others, his former fellow post-graduate student at Yale, Richard Rogers, with whom he set up his first practice, Team 4, in 1963.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of developing this stretch of Thamesside flood plains, Foster is aghast at the lack of plans for the infrastructure that makes intelligent and co-ordinated development possible. "Land here is a precious resource, and yet it is squandered."

By way of contrast, he cites his latest work in Italy. "On the edge of Milan, near Linate airport, we're working on the design of Santa Giulia, an extension of the city. There is no sprawl. The site measures 1.8km by 1km. It is connected to the centre of Milan by tram, within 20 minutes, as well as by road and train. A 490-metre colonnaded central boulevard connects all parts of the development. It is not just a housing scheme. Everything is happening at once: school, student hostel, hotels, shops, conference centre, a church by the Swiss architect Peter Zumthor, as well as housing for 9,000 people. The whole centre, arranged around squares and proper streets, will have much the same layering and density as the Italian towns we all love walking around, while offering parks and breathing spaces, too. The Italians have long known what makes a livable town or city."

Where, though, does Foster go now? And what does he see as his legacy? He pauses - uncharacteristically. He gets up and plays with the silver blind filtering our view of Battersea rooftops. "If I look back to where we started as a practice [as Foster Associates in 1967], one of our concerns was the democratisation of the workplace, the breaking down of blue collar-v-white collar culture, a reinvention of the office. And, then, there's been the reinvention, or rediscovery, of the airport. Beyond these, it's been the connection of architecture with infrastructure; we're not there yet ... and to have seen so many of those who have worked with the practice, like David Chipperfield, Jan Kaplicky, Michael Hopkins, Birkin Haward, Julia Barfield, David Morley, go on to do so well in their own right."

All true, yet nothing like a summary of Foster's extraordinary adventure in architecture. The truth is, his career is still a work-in-progress.

In the works

Some of Foster's current projects:

Supreme Court, Singapore A home for 23 courts and the Academy of Law.

Wembley Stadium, London The world's largest all-covered football stadium, seating 90,000.

Hearst Tower, New York 42-storey corporate HQ.

Palace of Peace, Astana, Kazakhstan 62m-high pyramid, a centre for world faiths including an opera house and a library.

Centrale Station, Florence New underground station for high-speed trains alongside existing 1930s station.

Repsol HQ, Madrid 34-storey office tower.

Jameson Tower, Vancouver Restoration of listed structure with 10-storey mixed-use building and 25-storey residential tower.

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