Norman Foster

Norman Foster, born in 1935, British architect who received the Pritzker Prize, one of the most prestigious awards in architecture, in 1999. Foster has been a key figure in modern architecture since the early 1980s and is noted for his artistic merger of high-tech materials and design.

Foster was born in Manchester, England, and began studying architecture and town planning at Victoria University of Manchester in 1956. In 1961 he won a fellowship for graduate study at Yale University in the United States, from which he received an M.A. degree. On his return to London in 1963, Foster set up an architectural practice called Team 4 Architects along with Richard Rogers, who had been a fellow student at Yale; Rogers’s wife Su; and Wendy Cheesman, who became Foster’s wife. The practice established a reputation for its designs for housing projects and industrial buildings. In 1967 Norman and Wendy Foster established Foster Associates.

Foster began with spare, simple designs and little exterior ornamentation, as in the Reliance Controls building in Swindon, England (1966). Since then Foster has made greater use of curved lines and a wide range of building materials. The Willis Faber & Dumas Headquarters (built from 1971 to 1975) in Ipswich, England, marked an important step in Foster’s work: Glass walls form an elegant curve that encloses the maximum possible area by following the contours of an awkwardly shaped site in the middle of town.

Foster’s designs have an unusual degree of unity; he maintains control over all features of the interior, such as door handles and lighting fixtures, as well as the structural parts of the building. An example of this concern for detail can be seen in the terminal building at Stansted Airport (1981-1991), northeast of London, England. Here, large structural cross-braces on the airport’s exterior are mirrored by small, decorative metal bracing on the interior roof supports, and both echo the wires and cross-braces in the wings of early biplanes—airplanes with two sets of wings, one above the other.

Foster received international attention for the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation Headquarters in Hong Kong (1979-1986), which many critics regard as his masterpiece. Reputedly among the most expensive buildings ever constructed, it is made of the highest-quality materials throughout and has won many awards for its design and construction. The central core of the 50-story skyscraper is an atrium that admits daylight into the interior. Foster’s international reputation grew with commissions for the Carré d’art (1984-1993), a cultural center in Nîmes, France; Hong Kong’s Chek Lap Kok Airport (1992-1998); and the remodeling of the Reichstag (1992-1999), Germany’s parliament building in Berlin.

Foster’s projects in the United States include an addition to the Joslyn Art Museum (1992-1994) in Omaha, Nebraska; and a Center for Clinical Sciences Research (1995-2000) at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. In 2006 his design for one of three skyscrapers to be built beside the Freedom Tower, on the site of the former World Trade Center, was unveiled. His glass building features four slanting diamonds at its apex, intended to point toward a memorial park. Other projects in Britain include the redevelopment of the Great Court and Reading Room at the British Museum (1994-2000), London; the Millennium Bridge (1996-2002), a new pedestrian suspension bridge over the Thames River in London linking Saint Paul’s Cathedral with the Tate Modern (see Tate Gallery); London’s City Hall (1999-2002); and the Swiss Re Tower (1997-2004, officially known as 30 St. Mary Axe) in London, a circular building that maximizes the amount of natural lighting.

Foster was knighted in 1990 and made a member of the Order of Merit, Britain’s highest honor, in 1997. He was made a life peer in 1999 and took the title Lord Foster of Thames Bank.