designer
Sir Norman Foster is the architect who’s come closest to establishing a universal style for the age. His latest project, Hong Kong airport, opened last week. Liz Jobey reports
Sir Norman Foster rang back. “Sorry, we got cut off as I walked into the Savoy,” he said. “I was on my way to a Building of the Year Award lunch.”
The answer to the next question was something of a formality. And did you win anything? Briskly: “Yes, we did, as a matter of fact. We got a Building of the Year Award for Duxford.”
“Duxford” is shorthand for the saucer- shaped concrete-and-glass American Air Museum that Foster & Partners finished at Duxford aerodrome near Cambridge last year. It houses a collection of United States military aircraft clustered around a gigantic B-52, one of those that dropped millions of tons of bombs during the Vietnam war, and whose 60m wingspan prescribed the building’s diameter. From the outside, the museum presents a smooth, low, cockpit-shaped curve of glass to the horizon set on a man-made grassy knoll, rather like the one that supports nearby Stansted airport, a Foster building finished in 1991, where the landscaped mound is a crucial part of the construction, since it conceals the ducts, pipes, cables and service systems other airports load into the ceiling, turning them into the familiar, claustrophobic, strip-lit bunkers.
If Duxford grows out of the earth, Stansted looks about to leave it. The high pavilion roof seems so lightweight the wind might lift it up, like a giant tent, and the glass walls let in so much natural light that, even on a grey day, there is little need for electricity. Not far away, in Norwich, an earlier- generation Foster building, the Sainsbury Centre for the Visual Arts, is an obvious precursor to Stansted, a huge, rectangular glazed shed, which, despite its need for re-cladding, still bears testimony to the Foster principles: lightweight, strong, efficient, clean, a hangar with a difference.
Twenty years ago, it won Foster his greatest number of awards to date. Stansted has won so many it would get boring to list them all, but they include ones for the use of laminated glass, for concrete, for structural steel; for town planning, for childcare services, for energy efficiency; for the majestic railway station that stretches under the length of the airport like some great futuristic Italian terminus. But, maybe most important of all, it put Foster in the running for Chek Lap Kok, the new Hong Kong airport, which stands on an entire island of reclaimed land – the biggest building site in the world.
Foster won the contract in 1992 and, after trial runs involving hundreds of volunteer “travellers”, it opened last week, to coincide with first anniversary of the hand-over of Hong Kong to the Chinese. “But it’s been finished for ages,” Foster said, as if slightly irked that his record of bringing in buildings on time and on budget was being thwarted by the exigencies of history.
From above, the Hong Kong terminal spreads out over the island in the shape of a jet, a big architectural pun of a building that looks as if it might have been inspired by a plane-spotter’s diagram. Foster’s buildings have a touch of sci-fi to them, just as they frequently borrow materials and technology first developed by the aerospace industry. He is one of a number of international architects frequently engaged by developers in the battle to build the biggest tower in the world. And like some pre-millennial Don Quixote, he still believes in the vertical city, an architect’s dream that began at the beginning of the 20th century and is still waiting to come true in the next.
In the 30 years since he left his partnership with Richard Rogers, Foster has built up one of the most commercially successful architectural practices in the world. It currently employs just under 400 people, who work in a large glass box on the Thames at Battersea Bridge, which he designed, and where he lives with his third wife and new baby in an apartment over the shop. Though he has five senior partners who have been with him for more than 20 years, the ethos is still very much Foster’s own. It has produced a series of technologically advanced and spatially inspiring buildings that have pushed Foster into the top rank of international architects, along with IM Pei, Richard Meier, Cesar Pelli and, though their buildings couldn’t be more different, Frank Gehry.
The discipline he exercises over his practice, together with his personal fitness regime – his running, skiing, flying obsessions – and his capacity for work, have given him something of a master-of-the-universe reputation. If all his buildings were put together, you would have the city of the future, a mighty Blade Runnerish place of corporate skyscrapers, communication towers, integrated apartment blocks, post-industrial factories, airports, helipads, bridges and rapid transit systems, with cultural centres, art galleries, renovated buildings, research laboratories, universities, concert halls, sports stadia, health centres, shops, and, here and there, a few single houses, a listed building, a community home, a yacht, a school, a bank.
Despite the fact that it was finished more than a decade ago, the headquarters of the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank is still Foster’s most famous building, a massive statement of confidence on behalf of a company looking a decade ahead to the hand-over to the Chinese. It was said to be the most famous building in the world, and the directors didn’t stipulate a budget, only that the building “must look like a bank”. The three great linked towers, with a huge central atrium, soaring up though 41 storeys of glass and steel, set the temple-of-Mammon corporate style for the millennium.
There has to be a great deal of the diplomat in Foster. His biggest, most ambitious European project (as opposed to the tallest, which is his recently completed Commerzbank tower in Frankfurt) is the reconstruction of the Reichstag, as the new German parliament building, which has involved years of meetings with German politicians, during which time he’s also built a metro system in Bilbao, two space-age communications towers for Barcelona and Santiago de Compostela, and redesigned parts of the old industrial city of Duisburg on the Ruhr along new, integrated, ecological lines.
At 63, Foster’s decisive, energetic, can-do delivery is more American than British. “He’s genuinely driven,” said the architect David Chipperfield, who worked for Foster Associates in the Eighties before starting his own practice. “Some architects take refuge from the corporate world behind private patrons, Norman wants to be out there. He’s much more aggressive. He’s a participator. Everything that goes in his motor goes in the same direction. He’s not afraid of the practical responsibility. He wants the absolute guts of a project. He wants the parliament building, the airport, the railway station, the bank. In a way, it’s a slightly naive enthusiasm. But it’s all of a piece: his inquisitorial mind, his naivety and his drive. He doesn’t have any cynicism. He loves the facts of his buildings. He’ll say, `Wow! isn’t it amazing?’ And there’s a certain amount of salesmanship in there, too. The clients get excited along with him.”
“I’ve always been passionate about architecture,” Foster said. “Even when it seemed impossible ever to be able to translate it into anything viable. I suppose, in a sense, it was a kind of fantasy world that I lived in privately through books from the local lending library.” The library is still there, too, though the stock of specialist books has diminished over the years. Foster went back himself after winning the RIBA gold medal in 1983, but the books from his teens – Henry Russell Hitchcock’s In the Nature of Materials about Frank Lloyd Wright, and Le Corbusier’s Towards a New Architecture – had gone long ago.
Foster would have read Le Corbusier’s famous definition: “Architecture is the masterly, correct and magnificent play of masses brought together in light.” And his description of the house as a machine for living: “Impossible to wait on the slow collaboration … of excavator, mason, carpenter, joiner, tiler, plumber … Houses must go up all of a piece … made by machine tools in a factory, assembled as Ford assembles cars . . . like an aircraft, with the same structural methods, lightweight framing, metal braces, tubular supports.” And somehow it filtered into the soul of man who, when asked to choose his favourite building, chose a Jumbo jet.
Foster was born in 1935 in Levenshulme, a working-class suburb of Manchester. He left school at 16 and went to work in the treasurer’s department in the neo- gothic splendour of Manchester Town Hall. “I was fascinated by it as a building. I enjoyed those incredible nooks and crannies and staircases and hideyholes. I was in awe of the lavatories, which were treated like places of great ceremonial occasion. You had banks of urinals in a circular plan and this great glass box with all the plumbing. I mean heroic stuff. I’d wander around Manchester at lunchtime, looking at the buildings, Ryland’s Library, the Barton arcade, Owen Williams’s newspaper building clad in black glass. And I was always doodling. I never stopped doing that.”
After two years national service, he got a place at Manchester University to study architecture. “It’s a bit difficult to say without sounding really corny,” he said, “but in the area that I grew up in, the idea that somebody could go to a university was a bit like saying I’d be the pope next year.” He couldn’t get a grant, because he didn’t have any A-levels, so he had to work.
He graduated in 1961, and won a scholarship to Yale. “America was a complete transformation for me. In Britain, I was the odd one out, the only one who had to work through university. When I got to America, it was tremendously refreshing. I chose Yale because, at the time, it had the most interesting architecture school, and I was very fortunate. For me, it wasn’t work. I have to say that. The idea that school would open on the first day of term and close on the last, and you could work any time day or night was just unbelievable. It was a great luxury.”
At Yale, he met Richard Rogers, who was on the same course, and Rogers’s first wife, Su. Together with another friend, Carl Abbott, they made trips across the US, looking at American architecture. “They were extraordinary forays,” Foster remembered. “We were seeing the best of everything. It could be Frank Lloyd Wright, it could be Mies van der Rohe, it could be Charles Eames, it could be Nasa installations, adobe villages in New Mexico, the Watts Towers in Los Angeles.” In Los Angeles, they saw the experimental Case Study houses, which used industrial materials and construction methods – they left a deep impression on Rogers and Foster alike.
Back in England, in 1963, he set up a practice called Team 4, which involved five people: Foster, Wendy Cheeseman, whom he married the next year, her sister, Georgina Wolton, who was the only fully qualified architect when they set out, and Richard and Su Rogers. Their first building was for Rogers’s father-in-law, Marcus Brumwell, a tiny glass-topped concrete “look-out” with electricity and a small kitchen, sunk into a Cornish hillside. But the building that began to show something of the aesthetic they would later develop in their different ways, was a small factory building for Reliance Controls, near Swindon. It not only employed industrial materials and modular methods of construction, it did away with the old divide between the management and the workers, and put them all in an elegant metal-and-glass shed.
Anthony Hunt was a young structural engineer in the mid-Sixties. He worked on the early Team 4 building, and many of Foster’s (and some of Rogers’s) since. “We broke the mould on that building,” he said, of the Reliance factory. “It was really the first building in this country based on knowledge of the lightweight, elegant steel-and-glass houses on the west coast of America. Right from the very early days, Norman was very rigorous, meticulous, precise. People often think he’s very controlled and rather humourless, but I think, really, he’s quite a shy person. Strong-willed, single-minded, motivated, yes, but also a very nice guy.”
When Team 4 broke up, Foster and his wife formed Foster Associates in 1967, a practice many other architects would pass through before becoming known in their own right – among them Michael Hopkins and Jan Kaplicky. They, along with Foster and Rogers, Nicholas Grimshaw and other architects who used industrial materials and construction methods as part of their aesthetic, were famously tagged, more for convenience than accuracy, “hi-tech”.
Some aspects of Norman Foster’s life are routinely open to caricature: Foster the competitive runner, the champion skier, the pilot who drops into meetings in his private jet. There are in-jokes about Foster’s practice: the purism, the work ethic, the severity of style. “All his architects have the same handwriting.” “Fosters only have one sample board.” “Fosters,” as one of the directors of the design group Pentagram said disparagingly, “seem to think that grey is a colour.” To which the response might be that Fosters think grey is the only colour.
Each project is run by a small group with its own group leader, and it is understood that Foster might appear at any time, in any place, to review the progress of a particular job. “It’s a testing thing,” said Grant Brooker, who led the project team for Hong Kong airport. “It can be like an examination. If he’s happy with the process, we carry on with what we’re doing. If not, it’s adjusted. That is Norman’s key role. He does it more by question, by provocation: `Why’s it like that?’ `Is this the best thing we can be doing?’ You can’t design in a vacuum. You have to have a creative dynamic, and he’s the man who sets the balance.”
Brooker joined 18 months out of college, 11 years ago. “It’s a totally international office. Of course, people leave. For all sorts of reasons. Some people don’t like working in an office this size, with so many people. I just thought it was an amazing experience. I’m working on the biggest public building project in the world. I can’t describe how exciting it is to be involved in something of that scale.”
As Foster sat down to talk, he seemed wrapped up in London, full of optimism for the city’s future. His vision of integrated skyscrapers with swathes of green public space below, sounded a little too similar to Sixties high-rise housing to me, but to him it represents a new, clean, post-industrial space with work and home side by side, or, as in his case, on top of one another.
“If you take this building we’re in now – which is not a skyscraper – 100 people live here, and about 300 people work here. This building was revolutionary at the time it was built, because, traditionally, you did a workshop block, an office block and a residential block. It was unthinkable that you should put them all together. Now, you don’t need too much of a leap to imagine cafes, restaurants, shops, people spilling out on to traffic-free areas with a drop-off for cars at the front door …”
But wasn’t that for an elite? What about the people who couldn’t afford it, or didn’t want to live like that, but wanted to stay in their streets of houses with little gardens? Would they be gradually sucked up into high-rise condos? “It’s not really so revolutionary,” he said. “It’s just observing that the city is in a continuous process of renewal, and that if buildings become obsolescent because they’re not able to adapt to social or technological change then, unless they’re of outstanding merit, they’ll be replaced, and that has to be as true for housing as it has to be for offices.” (When I asked him whether he built for posterity, he gave the diplomat’s answer: “All one can hope is, if the buildings are replaced, they will be replaced by something better.”) “It’s getting that balance between the past and the future. There is a responsibility in London to develop at high density, and to develop the extraordinary amount of space which still exists in the inner city. I mean some 5%, I think, is undeveloped space. To develop that would be quite a progressive start.”
He had begun to sound like a politician, and I wondered how far this local government activity was going to take him. Had he considered standing for the mayor of London? He gave me an owlish look. “Every project has a political dimension, some greater than others. When you’re immersed in the project it’s hard not to get immersed in the politics, too. But I can only make changes by advocacy. Somebody has to open the door first. Otherwise, you’ll be told you’re the arrogant architect telling somebody how they should live. In the end it comes down to the level of political backing and commitment and the courage to be unpopular.”
He quoted the kind of politicians who have ensured the success of his projects in other cities. In Nmes, for example, where the plan to build a modern cultural centre next to the famous classical temple, was pushed through against public opinion by mayor Jean Bousquet. “In Bilbao, we spent a fortune in demonstrating that you could do concrete that would resist graffiti. Somebody could come with an aerosol and you’d be able to wipe it off. We could have saved ourselves a lot of time and money by not doing it, but they’re so proud of it, it’s spotless. It’s about adding that other factor, the wow factor, if you like, something people can take tangible pride in. You can see the effect of the Frank Gehry building in Bilbao, it’s incredible.”
One thing that had improved, he thought, was the range of opportunity for architects between Europe and Britain. “Five years ago, apart from one or two Americans, the concept of foreign architects working in this country didn’t exist. It’s changed, and it’s changed for the better. Last night, at the Guildhall, I had to give a talk about the Reichstag and said: “Could you imagine the reaction five years ago to a headline that read: German architect chosen to design new British Parliament in Westminster?”
The problem with the Reichstag was that, not only did the building need renovating, but its historical symbolism had to be addressed and redirected. His solution has been to recast the building as a kind of three-dimensional representation of democracy, turning the dome into a glass observatory, from which the public can look down on to the government chamber below, with the press suspended in galleries in between. At night, the glowing dome will remind the visitors that parliament is in session.
The ecological aspects sounded still more impressive. “The old Reichstag building as refitted in the 1960s was depositing something like 7 000 tons of CO2 into the atmosphere every year. We demonstrated that we could reduce that to just over 400 tons,” he said. “That’s a 94% reduction in discharge of greenhouse gases, and that is not burning any fossil fuels, but vegetable oil, which is renewable. The waste heat from the process is not being discharged, it’s being converted into cooling …” He can continue effortlessly like this for hours.
“The thing you can say about Foster is that he’s an all-round architect, and that stands above everything else,” Jan Kaplicky said. “He can be a conceptual man, a detail man, a sketch-and-scribble man. He’s also a very determined and knowledgeable man, and one has to have admiration for that. I also think he’s a happy man now, and that’s important to anybody. I think his life is remarkably complete.”
I had asked Foster if one of the things that he found most satisfying about being an architect was that it required a kind of grand solving of problems, and he looked a bit disappointed, and said: “In one sense, yes. But if you say it’s simply solving the problem, you’re leaving out the spiritual dimension. Take an airport. What is it that leads you to say, `God, that was an awful experience I had getting through that airport this morning’, and what is it that gives you the experience of getting on to the plane and feeling maybe your spirits have been lifted? In a way, you have to amplify the problem, you have to say, in an ideal world this has to be an uplifting experience, and start there.”