by Norman Foster is sitting in the Madrid offices he set up to discuss the UK government’s scrapping of the proposed high-speed rail service between Birmingham and Manchester, his home town. He is upset with the decision. The material even brings out its Mancunian flavor.
The ditching of this step meant “the undoing of the greatest equalizer to the leveling up,” says Britain’s most prominent architect. “A complete lack of foresight. This is the quality of decision-making.”
Didn’t critics argue that the project would save a lot of travel time?
“HS2 was not about moving a few people underground and saving a few minutes,” he says. “It was about taking the stress off the existing networks so that they could better serve the region in terms of shorter commutes. It was short-term in favor of building more roads and consuming more countryside and more potential for urban sprawl.”
Lord Foster – Baron Foster of Thames Bank – is 88. He is slim, sparkly, keen to debate and very concerned about cities: how to improve them and the lives of the people who live in them. He is speaking at the launch of the Norman Foster Institute for Sustainable Cities, an outgrowth of the Madrid-based foundation he founded in 2017. He shows no sign of flagging, despite having just hosted a symposium and event for more than 100 so far. late into the previous evening.
Foster has retreated to an annex – minimalist and noble – of the former palace where his foundation is based, behind a gate on a quiet side street. He has deep ties to Madrid – he owns a house here and his wife, Elena, is Spanish, a publisher and now Vice President of the Foundation.
Foresight is his task. “Sustainable” may be a clichéd term, but Foster uses it for more than greenwashing. The institute will be a technical master’s course to train future civic leaders to make evidence-based decisions. Scholars from all over the world – architects, computer scientists, engineers, data analysts – will develop a “new model for cities” by working on common problems such as transport, climate change, energy supplies, governance and economic innovation. “The environment is too important to leave to the architects.”
Foster’s focus is the global future. Foster describes cities as “our greatest invention”, he says, responsible for 90 percent of global wealth creation. But they are also under pressure from forces such as urban migration, population growth, housing shortages and climate change.
“In the next 26 years, we must create the equivalent of 17 new Madrids every year,” he says (or, as his foundation calculates, more than 111 million new homes per year). “How thoughtful or otherwise we want [civic leaders] to be?”
It is a distinctive project for an architect whose practice is responsible for some of the most famous buildings in the world: Apple Headquarters in San Francisco, The Gherkin, Beijing international airport, the Reichstag in Berlin. All are different but share a Foster-ish aesthetic, an air of hope and exhilaration with an emphasis on space and light. Despite the fame and fortune these constructions have brought him, it is “what happens between buildings” that he finds most interesting – perhaps a legacy of his modest early life.
Foster was born in 1935 in Reddish, Stockport. His father was a machine painter; his mother worked in a bakery. He came to architecture circuitously; like many of the working-class families who graduated from grammar school in that era, he left at the age of 16. He took a clerical job in Manchester Town Hall, where he describes his horror at Alfred Waterhouse’s Victorian neo-gothic extravaganza.
After National Service with the RAF he joined an architectural office as an assistant and set his sights on professional training. He successfully applied to Manchester University’s school of architecture, but was offered a lesser qualification because he did not have A-levels. “Then I went to [the city council’s] education department but they said we can’t give you a grant because you are not graduating. So I was in a catch-22.”
He financed the degree himself with part-time jobs – at a garage, in a bakery – while his fellow students focused on studies. “I had very supportive parents, I lived at home and worked.” He believes that today’s flexible entry systems would do better; Such social mobility would be “much easier now”.
An excellent student, Foster moved to Yale in the early 1960s, where he met the late Richard Rogers who founded Team 4 with Su Brumwell and Wendy Cheesman, a short-lived but innovative practice in the UK, before founding Foster + Partners in 1967.
At university, he discovered that architecture was about “designing a high rise and giving it to an engineer to work on”. He was more interested in “the essence of the city… the way buildings create public spaces”. He drew inspiration from university quadrangles, from the Campo in Siena, the Royal Crescent in Bath. “I am a passionate traditionalist for the street, the square, the preservation of the countryside, from learning from tradition and history.”
What is his view that much modern urban development is sterile – what the authors of Living with Beauty, the UK government’s 2020 regeneration report, called “unclean, clumsy and placeless” buildings? Blandness, he says, is a failure of planning. “If you plan well and get the community involved, which we can do very effectively now, you can create the most desirable environments.” He fears London is likely to become “repetitive” if decision-making does not improve.
“London is, in many ways, on the coast of a great background legacy of good planning,” he says. “Abercrombie’s plan at the height of the Second World War, with its promotion of neighborhoods and the reinforcement of the green belt, was a great success.”
For all his talk of sustainability, some critics see contradictions in Foster’s environments and his contribution to large-scale development, especially airports. But he does not see a paradox. “The movement of goods, people and information is interconnected in terms of air, land and sea,” he said.
“It is impossible to single out a single thread and suggest that the skills that will ensure a higher level of sustainability and energy saving should be denied to its ground infrastructure.”
Aviation will change, he predicted. “The technology to convert seawater into jet fuel has already been proven… the aviation fleet could go green overnight.” (His work includes Stansted and Heathrow’s Terminal 5 and Foster + Partners will design the Abu Dhabi airport).
High-grade infrastructure can be a win for the environment, he says, referring to the 2.5km Millau Viaduct in France, built in 2004, the highest in the world, which he says has bent “five times the clock. [traffic] delays” down to “a few minutes” and thus reduce pollution.
It claims that clusters of tall buildings are less carbon-heavy than low-rise sprawl because they enable shopping, leisure and schools that make the best use of public transport, walking and cycling.” Ever the evidence-based optimist, he later sends me a heat map of Manhattan to prove his point.
I wonder, after six decades of his career, which projects he remembers the most. He cites Stansted Airport and the Sainsbury Center in Norwich, a fairly large gallery opened in 1978, designed to encourage greater visitor engagement in art. He mentions the Reichstag specially.
But he chooses a largely forgotten project: an amenity center he designed in the late 1960s for the shipping company Fred Olsen & Co at Millwall Ducks in London, “a tiny thing, long gone, swept away by Canary Wharf”.
In surviving photographs it looks like a spaceport, a post-futuristic structure raised on stilts above the industrial gloom. “The dockers were probably the worst workers in London,” says Foster. “It could be argued that they were the most conservative but for good reason, their working conditions were appalling. He created a luxurious working lifestyle that was transformative.”
Architecture to make a city function, an effort to improve lives, with its sights set firmly on the future.
For more information, visit normanfosterfoundation.org
