“I was fired by a passion for architecture, and seamlessly after graduating from Manchester went to work in London for the summer for the same practice that had helped me during my student days.” So I would then go off and I would discover Palladio or Jorn Utzon in Denmark, all before he won The Sydney Opera House competition in ’57,” he says. “I won £1,000 for my drawings at one RIBA competition, a sum that was worth the equivalent of at least £10,000 today. It was something that I would literally pay to do,” he says, adding that he supplemented his income with pay-outs from competitions.
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He worked constantly during that time, creating sketches for local architectural practices in between manual work to earn his way. He was unable to qualify through conventional channels for a degree course at Manchester University, so it created a diploma course for him. But it’s clear that he also stood out from the start. “It becomes the ultimate in sustainability because it’s an element of the past that can be regenerated – and that is an investment in the future,” he says.ĭesign is that endless quest for perfectionįoster refers to incidents of luck throughout his career. But it all makes sense when you hear Foster refer to The Whiteley as a “recycled building”. It’s an ethos that at first seems at odds with his practice’s latest London project, the £1bn overhaul of Whiteleys department store – a slice of London history conceived in 1911 as one of the city’s first luxury department stores, now being transformed into its first Six Senses hotel and spa, complemented by shops and swish apartments. Wisely, Foster steers clear of predictions, instead proposing one possible future where a change in mobility (the death of the gas-guzzling car) and the usage of buildings might improve life: the obsolete urban car park becoming an urban farm enabling city dwellers to use less water, fertiliser and to reduce their carbon footprint and redundant offices repurposed to offer homes to key workers pushed out to the suburban fringes of the metropolis. We think of a noble architecture of public squares and spaces and of a dense walkable, sustainable city.”įoster at the Yale School of Architecture’s Rudolph Hall © Weston Wells
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We don’t say the Great Fire of London or the introduction of Building Code party walls. “When we think of the DNA of London, the Georgian terraces and the brick construction, we don’t think fireproof. It’s a subject he’s been vocal about in recent interviews, pointing to their constant evolution and drawing parallels with other traumatic events in history that have magnified and hastened change. Nor does his belief that cities are the future, despite the paradigm shifts caused by the pandemic. Much like the field of communications where the ageing infrastructure of telephone poles, cables and exchanges have been designed out, this neighbourhood would not only be doing its job more elegantly, it would be doing more with less.”įoster’s ideas on sustainability, long synonymous with his work, come as no surprise. “It would generate power in a clean way instead of linking it to past ideas of the big power station and transmission lines. Design is that endless quest for perfection, so it would be a place where you would have a synergy between living and waste, which would not go to landfill but would be processed to generate energy, or to create another product like fertiliser,” he continues with the steady, measured tone of a well-versed orator. “One’s always chasing the end of the rainbow.
Now 86, tanned and decked out casually all in white, he looks as sharp as his razor-sharp mind. “I’d build a neighbourhood that functions autonomously,” he says from his home in the States. But asked what future he’d create with unlimited resources, his ideal is not a Blade Runner-like skyline of kinetic skyscrapers and flying cars, but something simpler and more sustainable, which builds on the idea of community. Lord Foster has conceived some of the world’s most iconic buildings – The Gherkin in London, Berlin’s The Reichstag, Cupertino’s Apple Park and the headquarters of the Hong Kong Shanghai City Bank.
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