Norman Foster sits in his foundation’s Madrid offices and discusses the UK government’s cancellation of a planned high-speed rail service between Birmingham and his hometown of Manchester. He was fed up with the decision. The subject even reveals his Mancunian accent.
Britain’s most eminent architect says abandoning this stage means “the cancellation of what has been the great equalizer to leveling up”. “A complete lack of foresight. That’s the quality of decision-making.”
Didn’t critics claim that the project would save little in travel time?
“The aim of HS2 was not to mobilize elites across the country and win a few minutes,” he says. “This was about relieving the stress of existing networks and thus providing better service regionally in terms of shorter journey times. This was a short-term approach that favored building more roads, consuming more rural land and providing greater potential for urban sprawl. ”
Lord Foster – Baron Foster of Thames Bank – aged 88. He is lean, lively, willing to argue, and deeply interested in cities: how we can improve them and the lives of the people who live there. He is speaking at the launch of the Norman Foster Sustainable Cities Institute, an arm of the Madrid-based foundation he founded in 2017. Even though he recently hosted a symposium and more than 100 events, he shows no signs of weakening. towards the late hours of the previous evening.
Behind a door in a quiet side street, Foster retreated to the minimalist and pristine annex of the former ducal palace where his foundation is located. Madrid connections are very deep; He has a home here, and his wife Elena, a publisher and currently vice president of the foundation, is also Spanish.
Forecasting is his preoccupation. “Sustainable” may be a buzzword, but Foster’s use of the term is more than just nonsense. The institute will be a technical master’s course to train future civic leaders in making evidence-based decisions. Scientists from around the world (architects, computer scientists, engineers, data analysts) will develop a “new model for cities” by working on common problems of many, such as transportation, climate change, energy resources, governance and economic innovation. “The environment is too important to be left to architects.”
Foster’s focus is on the global future. Foster describes cities as “our greatest invention,” responsible for 90 percent of global wealth creation. But they are also under pressure from factors such as urban migration, population growth, housing shortages and climate change.
“In the next 26 years, we have to create the equivalent of 17 new Madrids every year,” he says (or, according to his foundation’s calculations, more than 111 million new homes a year). “No matter how enlightened or otherwise we want [civic leaders] to be?”
It’s a characteristically daring project for an architect whose practice has taken on responsibility for some of the world’s most prestigious buildings: Apple’s headquarters in San Francisco, The Gherkin, Beijing’s international airport, the Reichstag in Berlin. They are all different but share a Foster-like aesthetic, an air of optimism and joy with an emphasis on space and light. Despite the fame and wealth these structures brought him, what he finds most interesting is “what goes on between the buildings”; perhaps a legacy of his modest early life.
Foster was born in Reddish, Stockport, in 1935. His father was a mechanical painter; his mother worked in a bakery. He came to architecture in a roundabout way; Like most working-class families attending primary school at the time, he left school at 16. He took a clerical job at Manchester Town Hall, where he described being fascinated by Alfred Waterhouse’s Victorian neo-Gothic fantasy.
After his military service in the RAF, he joined an architecture office as an assistant and set his sights on vocational training. He successfully applied to the University of Manchester’s architecture school, but was offered a lower qualification because he did not have A-levels. “Then I went [the city council’s] It’s the education department, but they said we can’t give you a scholarship because you didn’t get a diploma. So I was at catch-22.
While other students focused on studies, he financed the degree himself with part-time jobs in a garage and a bakery. “I had very supportive parents and lived and worked at home.” He believes that today’s flexible admissions systems will serve him better; such social mobility “would now be much easier”.
An outstanding student, Foster moved to Yale in the early 1960s, where he met the late Richard Rogers and formed the short-lived but innovative UK practice Team 4′ with Su Brumwell and Wendy Cheesman, before founding Foster + Partners in 1967. founded. .
In college, he thought architecture was “designing a tall building and then giving it to an engineer to run it.” He was more interested in “the essence of a city… the way buildings create public spaces.” He was inspired by university quadrangles, the Campo in Siena, the Royal Crescent in Bath. “I am a traditionalist who is passionate about preserving the street, the square and the countryside, learning from tradition and history.”
What does he think of the view that much modern urban development is barren, with the authors of the UK government’s 2020 regeneration report Living with Beauty calling “bland, cumbersome and out of place” buildings? He says blandness is a failure of planning. “If you plan well and involve the community (which we can now do very effectively), then you can create the most desirable environments.” He fears London is likely to become “repetitive” unless decision-making improves.
“London, in many ways, is moving towards the legacy of a remarkable history of good planning,” he says. “The Abercrombie plan at the height of World War II served extraordinarily well with the promotion of neighborhoods and the strengthening of the green belt.”
For all his talk of sustainability, some critics see contradictions in Foster’s environmentalism and fondness for large-scale development, especially airports. But he sees no paradox. “The movement of goods, people and information is interconnected by air, land and sea,” he counters.
“It is impossible to single out one strand and suggest that its ground-based infrastructure is deprived of capabilities that would enable higher levels of sustainability and energy savings.”
He predicts that aviation will change. “The technology to convert seawater into jet fuel has already been proven… the aviation fleet could go green overnight.” (His works include Stansted and Heathrow’s Terminal 5, and Foster + Partners will design Saudi Arabia’s Abha airport).
High-quality infrastructure can be a win for the environment, he adds, pointing to the 2.5 km-long Millau Viaduct in France, built in 2004 and the world’s tallest viaduct, and says it shrinks by “five hours”. [traffic] delays of up to “a few minutes” and thus reduced pollution.
He argues that clusters of high-rise buildings are less carbon-intensive than low-rise developments because they “enable proximity to shopping, entertainment and schools that make the most of public transport, walking and cycling.” Always an evidence-based optimist, he later proved his point by emailing me a heat map of Manhattan.
I wonder which projects you remember most fondly after your sixty-year career? He mentions Stansted Airport and the Sainsbury Center in Norwich, a modest-sized gallery opened in 1978 designed to encourage greater involvement in the arts by visitors. He makes special mention of the Reichstag.
But he chooses a mostly forgotten project: an entertainment center he designed for shipping company Fred Olsen & Co in London’s Millwall Docks in the late 1960s, “a little thing long gone, swept up by Canary Wharf”.
In surviving photographs, it resembles a spaceport, a retro-futuristic structure rising on columns above the industrial gloom. “Dockers were probably the worst-served workers in London,” says Foster. “They were arguably the most militant, but their working conditions were terrible, for good reason. He created a luxurious working lifestyle that was transformative.”
Architecture is an attempt to improve lives by ensuring that a city fulfills its function, with its perspective set on the future.
For more information, visit: normanfosterfoundation.org