There are architects whose fees are much higher than Foster’s. Bjarke Ingels told me that he had seen details of the competition that allowed him to compare the fees proposed by Foster with those of a famous European competitor: the other architect had asked for three times that amount. In Engels’ description, Foster + Partners can be seen as a Mercedes, not a “hand-crafted Aston Martin madness.”
Foster’s career, Foster’s biographer, recently said, “removed the barrier between the kind of architecture that architecture magazines look at and all the rest.” Naturally, Foster never stopped pushing for high-profile commissions. In the mid-1990s, the company won a series of major competitions, including the Reichstag, the British Museum, and the Millennium Bridge. Foster soon won the Pritzker Prize and was honored. He had previously been knighted, and was separately appointed for life to the Order of Merit, an elite cultural coterie of twenty-four people, chosen by the ruling monarch. In this role, Foster regularly lunched with the Queen Tom StoppardDavid Attenborough, and David Hockney. They are all now meeting with the king.
Foster’s second marriage to Sabiha Romani Malik ended in 1995. A year later, he married Elena Foster, who told a friend that on the couple’s first date, he played her videos of Buckminster Fuller. (Norman denies this.) At this time, the Foster Company employed two hundred and fifty people; By 2004, the number was six hundred. Recalling this expansion – before there was a design council or corporate partner – Graham Phillips described an office a little stressed by growth and, from his point of view, by Ken Shuttleworth’s self-reliance. While most of the firm’s senior architects were in constant, neurotic contact with Foster, Phillips said that Shuttleworth, who was experimenting with curvilinear forms, “tended to stick with it.” As a result, some designs “slipped through the net” of review and review, including the design for the City Hall, next to the River Thames. Phillips said it was technically brilliant. Its bulbous shape allowed it to reduce direct sunlight to a minimum, reducing energy costs, even while its all-glass shell was a metaphor for transparency. “But a lot of us at the company thought it was pretty ugly,” Phillips said. “Norman didn’t like it.” Ken Livingstone, the first mayor of London to use the building, called it the Glass Testicle. It is no longer the seat of London’s government, and its owners recently obtained permission to radically remodel it. Likewise, the jerkin, which had become a symbol of London, was unpopular in Battersea. “He didn’t look good, and I don’t think Norman thought that at all,” Phillips said.
In January 2003, Shuttleworth interviewed Marcus Fears for buildinga trade publication. After the conversation touched on City Hall, Wembley and the Gherkin – then known as Swiss Re, after its first tenant – Fairs asked Shuttleworth: “Did you design all those buildings?”
“It all comes from the office,” Shuttleworth replied. “We’re working together, and we’ll all be playing around with ideas with Norman and the others.” He added: “However, a lot of the initial sketches and ideas came from me. Swiss Re, for example.” He said he took the lead on the company’s proposal for the World Trade Center, where two towers touched or “kissed” at their tops.
“Does it bother you that your role in all these projects is rarely acknowledged?”
“Not at all. I’ve never sought publicity. I’m happy when Norman takes credit. That’s good. He owns the company. He’s the boss. He had the guts to start the company in the first place; he put his reputation on the line.”
It’s such an insight into the culture of Foster + Partners that these statements registered, internally, as outrage. As Shuttleworth recently put it: “Everyone was a little upset about it. I never meant to upset the apple cart. It’s the way I got out.” He apologized to Foster and other colleagues. However, Phillips recalled a meeting in which Foster and others participated, where Shuttleworth’s repentance did not go that far: he declined an opportunity to agree that he had said anything untrue. “Norman got up,” Phillips said. From the table and walked away and never spoke to him again.”
Shuttleworth did not remember any such scene. He and Foster continued to communicate. But in Shuttleworth’s memory, the office atmosphere became “tense.” By the end of the year, he had left to start his own company.
In October 2004, the Gherkin Building won the Stirling Prize, awarded annually to one British building. That same week, the latest in a series of books chronicling Foster’s career, compiled by the company, was published. This volume included the 2002 group photo. But Shuttleworth was no longer standing on Foster’s shoulder. It has been moved along five places, and Phillips has occupied its former place.
Shuttleworth, who recalled this demotion with a kind reference to Stalin, told me that Foster must have approved of the forgery, which became a minor news story. At the time, the company acknowledged the edit without apology, noting that “not all key employees” were present at the original photo shoot. (Phillips was out of the country.) In an email, Foster recently said the edit was made “to ensure accuracy.”
Today, Shuttleworth has moved on from the kind of architecture he practiced in his final years at Foster + Partners—a period in which, as he puts it, he got rid of his T-square. Throughout the profession, “we were all trying to outdo each other,” he said. He has since repented. The default should be square. “Make them square,” he told me. “Make it very low energy, not a lot of glass.”
Today, when Foster talks about “doing more with less,” it can sometimes be difficult to see less. He used Fuller’s phrase when he was at the top of 270 Park Avenue. Foster + Partners currently operates several airports, three of which are in Saudi Arabia. She is working on other monuments to Gulf states, and various structures to Western billionaires: besides Kenneth Griffin, these include Larry Ellisonof Oracle (an Oxford research campus named after him), and Bill Ackman, the right-wing financier married to Neri Oxman, the designer (penthouse on Central Park West; house on Long Island). Not long ago, a consultant who worked on the facade of the Bloomberg Building in London joked to a fellow professional that, given the budget, he could have covered the building with Ferraris. British authorities recently blocked proposals for a Foster + Partners-designed observation tower in London, directly adjacent to the Gherkin, in the form of a thousand-foot concrete Q-tip tower. (The company claimed, weakly, that it was motivated by “the desire to take public engagement with the city to a new level.”) When I asked Foster about the two-kilometre-tall tower in Riyadh –It was first reported by Architects Magazinebut the company did not publicly acknowledge this. He apologized for not being able to discuss the matter, or take me to an adjacent room where there were graffiti on the walls. He made some general observations: In signs that reach new heights, it may be possible to have “a perfect balance of energy, where you’re very cold at the top and very hot at the bottom — so it’s a wonderful cycle.” Separately, he suggested that wind shear may not be the problem you imagine, because “with altitude, the strength of the wind decreases.” (This observation was puzzling: as altitude increases, air density decreases, but this is usually matched by an increase in wind speed.)
Foster is an unparalleled leader of architects. He may appear less confident, and perhaps even a little exposed, in the role he often assumes now: that of techno-optimist guide to issues of sustainability and development. One of the oddities of Foster’s public persona, as an orator and sometime writer, is that he seems to seek less recognition for what he did — which is to make half the most powerful people in the world pay for buildings that are less than depressing. – and more so for what he largely did not do. He talks about housing units, or making cities more walkable.
Lee Foster suggested that there was an “environmental” case for the Millau Bridge, because it had succeeded in reducing severe local traffic congestion. This is not an environmental argument. (He later claimed that the bridge achieved carbon savings by shortening a major trade route, but he did so without reference to the carbon released during the making of the bridge, or to the phenomenon of “induced demand,” by which road improvements inspire greater road use.) Foster risks distorting The argument worth defending for such a bridge is one that pits carbon costs against societal benefits that might include quieter local roads and the survival of the Beautiful Things section. Several years ago, the Norman Foster Foundation attracted media coverage for proposals for drone delivery infrastructure in the developing world. Foster’s drawings showed undulating brick canopies, with no walls. The goal was to have one of the arched “drone airfields” in “every small town in Africa” by 2030. There are no operational buildings of this type. When the drone delivery company started operating in Rwanda, it used an ordinary-looking warehouse that could be closed at night.
Most recently, the foundation helped develop a prototype of emergency homes made of cement-reinforced fabric walls. Each was expected to cost more than fifteen thousand dollars. Foster’s main rationale for this strong determination was the claim that the average stay in a refugee camp is seventeen years. This number has been circulating on the Internet, and Foster has repeated it to me several times, but it is greatly exaggerated. When challenged, Foster said it would be accurate to say that refugees live “under the canvas” for an average of ten to fifteen years. He was now referring to World Bank estimates, covering the period since the end of the Cold War, of the average time a refugee spends in exile. But this estimate is about displacement – including people experiencing lifelong displacement – not time “under canvas” in camps. (The foundation has recently turned its attention to more permanent housing designed in a similar way.)
In January 2024, in Madrid, the Norman Foster Institute, a new part of the foundation, welcomed more than twenty international students to the Sustainable Cities Programme—a one-year course for “civic leaders of the future.” Some introductory events were held in the foundation’s townhouse, which houses much of Foster’s archive of drawings, sketchbooks and models. To the side of this building, in the courtyard, is a beautiful pavilion with a mirror ceiling, designed by Foster. Students gathered there for lectures by Aravena, Foster and others. The sights were strange for a sustainability gathering: the pavilion could be mistaken for an exhibition celebrating fossil fuels. The cabinet contains models of every type of aircraft Foster ever flew, including jets. At one end is a large-scale version, commissioned by Foster, of the Dymaxion – the diamond-shaped three-wheeled car designed by Buckminster Fuller in the 1930s and generally understood to be a death trap. (Foster’s not so sure.) Hanging on the tallest wall is a thirty-foot model of a Beijing airport terminal, which Foster + Partners completed in 2008; Measured by floor area—more than ten million square feet—it is one of the largest buildings in the world.
