Norman Foster(1935–)

Norman Foster was born at Reddish, between Stockport and Manchester, in June 1935, the only child of Robert Foster, a machine-tool fitter at the Metropolitan-Vickers works at Trafford Park, and Lilian Smith. He grew up in a two-up two-down on Crescent Grove, took the grammar-school examination, missed it, left school at sixteen and worked as an office boy at Manchester Town Hall through national service. He bought a stack of architectural magazines on the way to work each morning and read them at his desk. He applied to the Manchester School of Architecture as a self-paying student in 1956, on the strength of a portfolio of drawings done in his lunch breaks, and was admitted at twenty-one.

Manchester gave him a partial scholarship and the foundation; a Henry Fellowship took him to Yale in 1961, where he sat in the postgraduate studios alongside Richard Rogers, James Stirling and Eldred Evans under the tutelage of Paul Rudolph and Vincent Scully. He came home in 1963 and set up Team 4 in London with Rogers, Wendy Cheesman and Su Brumwell, the four-person practice that produced the Reliance Controls factory at Swindon in 1967 and dissolved that same year over the question of how a partnership should be run. Foster Associates opened on its own account in 1967 at the kitchen table of the Foster family flat at Hampstead. Wendy Cheesman, by then his wife, ran the office.

The reputation was built on five buildings across the next twenty years. The Willis Faber and Dumas insurance headquarters at Ipswich (1975) wrapped a free-form three-storey office in a glass curtain wall whose joints were the patented invention that made the form possible. The Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts at the University of East Anglia (1978) collapsed the gallery, lecture theatre and storage of a small museum into a single 130-metre aluminium-clad shed. The Renault distribution centre at Swindon (1982) hung its roof from yellow tubular masts and made the engineered structure the building's only ornament. The Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank headquarters at Hong Kong (1985) was, at completion, the most expensive building in the world and reorganised the corporate-tower type around a suspended steel exoskeleton and an open atrium that ran the full height. Stansted Airport (1991) put the services in an undercroft and the passengers in a column-free shed under daylight, and rewrote how every airport since has been planned.

The 1990s and 2000s rolled out the Foster house style across nearly every European and Asian capital and most of the major American ones. The reconstruction of the Reichstag in Berlin (completed 1999) glazed the burnt-out shell of the old parliament and crowned it with a cone-shaped viewing dome that became the symbol of reunified German democracy. The Millennium Bridge across the Thames (2000) lay flat between St Paul's and the Tate Modern in the most quietly engineered footbridge in the country. 30 St Mary Axe at the City of London (2004), known by everyone as the Gherkin, gave the post-financial-crisis skyline the form a generation of children would draw. The Wembley arch (2007), the new Hearst Tower in Manhattan (2006), the Apple Park headquarters at Cupertino (2017) and the Bloomberg London headquarters (2017) put the practice on the masthead of late-twentieth and early twenty-first century commercial-civic architecture.

Wendy Foster died of cancer in 1989. He was knighted in 1990 and raised to the peerage as Baron Foster of Thames Bank in 1999, the same year he was awarded the Pritzker Prize. He has been married four times, has six children, and lives between Madrid and Switzerland in his late eighties; the practice he founded as Foster Associates is now Foster + Partners, employs about a thousand people across twelve offices, and is the largest British architectural practice in the country's history. The Foster name in its dominant English form descends from the office of forester and rolls up the metathesis variants Forster and Forrester underneath it; the Reddish childhood and the Manchester Town Hall office boy are why the Foster catalogue today carries an architect alongside the Gospel-trained novelist E. M. Forster in the same surname's reach.