Norman Foster Paintings, Bio, Ideas

"I guess what I'm doing is I'm tracing a lineage, which is about structure, which is about the expression of structure, and perhaps rediscovering something from the past. And not just the American past, but our own past"

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"As an architect you design for the present, with an awareness of the past for a future which is essentially unknown"

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"Every time I've flown an aircraft, or visited a steelworks, or watched a panel-beater at work, I've learned something new that can be applied to buildings"

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"Since Stonehenge, architects have always been at the cutting edge of technology. And you can't separate technology from the humanistic and spiritual content of a building."

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"I was so highly motivated that, when I got into architecture school, nobody was going to stop me. The opportunity to study architecture was the most incredible privilege"

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"A debate about design is, for me, a debate about values, because I sincerely believe that there is a moral imperative for good design; to do it well and responsibly"

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"As a team we've reinvented the genre. We've reinvented the airport, we've reinvented the nature of the high-rise building, reinvented the relationship of the old and new in terms of how you create a new life cycle for a historic building."

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Summary of Norman Foster

Foster is arguably the world's most influential (and most honored) living architect. Something of a buccaneering figure whose spirit for personal adventure has spilled over into his professional life, he is guided by a strong sense of responsibility towards sustainability and the environment. Recognized chiefly for his jewel-like modern designs of steel and glass, and for a flair for smooth exterior contours and open, naturally-lit interiors, his designs stand out as landmarks in many of the world's greatest cities, including London, Berlin, New York, Hong Kong and Shanghai. The scope and vision of his ambition is evident in his involvement with an ongoing project in Masdar, a self-sustaining city in Abu Dhabi, while he is currently working in collaboration with the second superstar of world architecture, Frank Gehry, on a project to redevelop the site of London's famous Battersea Power Station (in which its four iconic chimneys will be left to stand).

Accomplishments

Foster came to prominence at a dour time for British architecture. Turning his back on the concrete "utopias" of the post war years Foster managed to "shake up" the architectural landscape with unconventional, "lightweight" and "calm", designs formed of silver tubes and glass that allowed visitors to the building(s) to be at one with their immediate surroundings.
Foster has been credited with reinventing the skyscraper and for pointing the way forward for future designers. By featuring spiraling geometric domes (in London), triangulated shapes (in New York) and tiered suspension structures (in Hong Kong) his skyscrapers stand as exemplars of the possibilities of how to invigorate uniform and congested city skylines.
Blending old and new (though opposed to postmodernism for its lack of seriousness) Foster's interiors hark back to the "old" modern spirit of the Bauhaus's Walter Gropius in their detestation of "clutter". Indeed, celebrated within architectural circles as much for his pure and harmonious interiors as his exteriors, Foster's structures, including The Reichstag building in Berlin, conceal from plain sight every piece of internal plumbing and equipment.
Having reinvented the skyscraper, Foster is credited with doing the same for the airport, first at Stanstead (UK), and then Beijing (China). Seeing the airport as a "reviled building type", Foster sought to create a space that celebrates the "poetry of flight". His terminals are filled with natural light and expansive views of the air traffic that encourages the traveler to enjoy an almost meditative pre-flight experience.

Biography of Norman Foster

Foster reimmagined the classical, 19th century Reichstag building in Berlin, filling this dome in glass and open air views. This is just one, although very popular, example of the amazing projects Foster has brought to fruition.

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Important Art by Norman Foster

Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts (1978)

The building was commissioned by Sir Robert and Lady Sainsbury to hold their impressive collection of art. Attached to the concrete buildings of Denys Lasdun's University of East Anglia, Foster was told to create an unconventional gallery to suit the Sainsburys' belief that the study of art should be an informal, pleasurable experience, not bound by the traditional enclosure of object and viewer.

Influenced by Mies van der Rohe's Nationalgalerie in Berlin, Foster wanted to create a gleaming silver tube, that literally and figuratively turned its back on the concrete-heavy architecture of the past. The Foster + Partners practice had been exploring lightweight, flexible enclosures, and Foster built on this, providing a vast glass atrium which hid all the structural and service elements of the building in the double-layer walls and roof. (He was to be so committed to this vision that he even hid door locks in the floor, so as not to interrupt the sleek finish.) Inside the shell is a sequence of spaces that incorporates galleries displaying works by Picasso, Bacon and Degas, alongside a reception area, the Faculty of Fine Art, a common room and restaurant. At the end of the building, looking towards the lake, are full-height windows allowing visitors within to see the work of Anish Kapoor, Henry Moore and Antony Gormley in the sculpture park beyond.

Architecture critic Deyan Sudjic wrote: "The late 1970s were a particularly bleak time for contemporary architecture in Britain. The soured [post-war] utopias of concrete social housing triggered a crisis of confidence. The Sainsbury Centre changed all that. Confident, strikingly beautiful and radical in conception, it pointed to a new direction." When Foster showed his creation to his friend Buckminster Fuller, "Bucky" asked: "How much does your building weigh Norman?" Foster, not knowing the answer, was stunned into silence. He later found out it was in fact 5,328 tonnes, but in the course of the calculations, Foster made a discovery concerning a building's harmony and balance that was to inform the rest of his career: "I realised the disproportionate amount of weight in the least attractive part of the building. It was an interesting voyage of discovery".

Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank Headquarters (1986)

Sudjic stated that: "If you were to put the Sainsbury Centre next to the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, you would see the difference between a glider and a jumbo jet [...] It is powerful and dynamic, where the Sainsbury Centre is calm and floating". The HSBC bank's chairman at the time, Michael Sandberg, said he wanted the best new bank building in the world. The tower was to act as a symbol of the bank's commitment to Hong Kong before the handover to China. As such, Foster had to be sensitive to cultural issues, as well as building a million square feet of office space in a relatively short timescale. Foster was fascinated with Feng Shui - Chinese geometry - and hired a geomancer to help with the project. The resulting tower saw him "reinventing the skyscraper". As Sudjic said: "It was the first time that anyone outside America made a skyscraper that looked like it was anything but a copy of an American."

The building relied on a suspension structure, with pairs of steel masts arranged in three bays. As a result, the building form is articulated in a stepped profile of three individual towers, respectively twenty-nine, thirty-six and forty-four stories high, which create floors of varying width and depth and allows for garden terraces. Inside is a ten-story atrium, providing workers with space and light from both sides of the flexible office space, as a vast mirrored "sunscoop" reflects sunlight down through the atrium to the floor of a public plaza below.

The HSBC bank saw Foster + Partners receive international critical acclaim, but it did not come without risk; the building was one of the most expensive made, required heavy borrowing and nearly bankrupting the architectural practice. The building has since become a landmark. As the Observer Magazine wrote: "In the congested centre of Hong Kong, the Bank unfurls from the sky, like a mechanised Jacob's Ladder, and touches the ground".

Reichstag, New German Parliament (1999)

The Reichstag building in Berlin was another project that was loaded with cultural sensitivity. Commissioned by Otto Bismarck 20 years after the unification of Germany in 1871 to celebrate the founding of the Second Reich, the building was torched by Nazi Stormtroopers in 1933 and assaulted by the Red Army in 1945. This history was not to be erased, Foster said when he won the commission to reshape it in 1992. He wanted to preserve the battle scars and graffiti left by Red Army soldiers - in his words,"to erase history is to refuse to learn from it". As well as creating a "living museum", Foster aimed to produce a sustainable and accessible building that was a significant democratic forum. As such, public and politicians enter the building together and the public realm continues in the eating spaces and the new cupola, built of steel and glass, that has since become a landmark, allowing "people to ascend symbolically above the heads of their representatives in the chamber". As Foster said: "The Reichstag was very much about creating the democratic forum for a reunified Germany [and] has become not only the symbol of the city but the symbol of the nation".

The glass cupola that crowns the building and illuminates at night both heralds its presence, and brings daylight to the building's inhabitants. Symbolizing rebirth, at the center of the great dome is an architectural feature that reflects light back down into the building, producing a dazzling, natural light chamber. This is its one of its best achievements, says architectural critic Jonathan Glancey: "Daylight falls on stone floors, stone walls, a solid, generous, clear-cut architectural expression in which, to date, there is no clutter, no evident gimmickry and where every bit of potentially messy equipment - heating, ventilation, loudspeakers, sprinklers, alarms - has been tucked into graceful sculpted units that march quietly, if determinedly, through the building". For Glancey, the Reichstag was a building that started life as an "ugly duckling that suffered terribly as it grew up, was abandoned, bodged up and ended up almost a swan".

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Influences and Connections

Influences on Artist

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Frank Lloyd Wright
Walter Gropius
Joseph Paxton
Serge Chumiaf
Vincent Skully

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Movements & Ideas

Bauhaus
Modern Architecture

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Architectural Modernism

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Useful Resources on Norman Foster

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Books

The books and articles below constitute a bibliography of the sources used in the writing of this page. These also suggest some accessible resources for further research, especially ones that can be found and purchased via the internet.

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Content compiled and written by Sarah Ingram

Edited and revised, with Summary and Accomplishments added by Anthony Todd

"Norman Foster Artist Overview and Analysis". [Internet]. . TheArtStory.org
Content compiled and written by Sarah Ingram
Edited and revised, with Summary and Accomplishments added by Anthony Todd
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First published on 21 Apr 2020. Updated and modified regularly
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