Norman Robert Foster, Baron Foster of Thames Bank (born 1 June 1935), is an English architect and urbanist. He is widely recognised as a seminal pioneer of high-tech architecture and a defining figure in British modernism. His structural steel-and-glass designs have fundamentally shaped late 20th- and early 21st-century urban landscapes worldwide.
Born into a working class family in Stockport, Foster studied architecture at the University of Manchester before earning a master's degree from the Yale School of Architecture. Upon returning to England, he co-founded the short-lived but highly influential architectural collective Team 4 alongside Richard Rogers. In 1967, he established Foster Associates—later rebranded as Foster + Partners—which has grown into the largest and most commercially successful architectural practice in the UK.
Foster achieved critical acclaim for early industrial and corporate structures, most notably the Willis Faber and Dumas Headquarters in Ipswich and the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts in Norwich. These projects pioneered open-plan internal structural grids and innovative curtain walling. His international breakthrough came in 1985 with the HSBC Building in Hong Kong, a revolutionary high-tech tower featuring a suspended structural steel framework. His subsequent portfolio includes some of the world's most recognisable post-modern landmarks, including the reconstructed glass Reichstag dome in Berlin, 30 St Mary Axe ("The Gherkin") and the Queen Elizabeth II Great Court of the British Museum in London, and the solar-powered Apple Park corporate campus in Cupertino, California.
In his later career, his focus has shifted significantly toward green urban density and urban planning through the Norman Foster Foundation and the Norman Foster Institute. He has received nearly every major accolade in the discipline, winning the RIBA Royal Gold Medal in 1983, the AIA Gold Medal in 1994, and the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 1999. He was knighted in 1990 and created a life peer in 1999.
His current works are required within the Design and Technology AQA GCSE syllabus
Norman Robert Foster was born in 1935 in Reddish, two miles (3.2 km) north of Stockport, formerly a part of Lancashire but by then incorporated into the County Borough of Stockport. He was the only child of Robert and Lilian Foster (born Smith). The family moved to Levenshulme, a neighbouring suburb of Manchester, where they lived in poverty. His father was a machine painter at the Metropolitan-Vickers works in Trafford Park, which influenced Norman to take up engineering, design, and, ultimately, architecture. His mother worked in a local bakery. Foster's parents were diligent and hard workers who often had neighbours and family members look after their son, which Foster later believed restricted his relationship with his mother and father.
Foster attended Burnage Grammar School for Boys in Burnage, where he was bullied by fellow pupils and took up reading. He considered himself quiet and awkward in his early years. At 16, he left school and passed an entrance exam for a trainee scheme set up by Manchester Town Hall, which led to his first job, an office junior and clerk in the treasurer's department. In 1953, Foster completed his national service in the Royal Air Force, choosing the air force because aircraft had been a longtime hobby. Upon returning to Manchester, Foster went against his parents' wishes and sought employment elsewhere. He had seven O-levels by this time, and applied to work at a duplicating machine company, telling the interviewer he had applied for the prospect of a company car and a £1,000 salary. Instead, he became an assistant to a contract manager at a local architects, John E. Beardshaw and Partners. The staff advised him that if he wished to become an architect, he should prepare a portfolio of drawings using the perspective and shop drawings from Beardshaw's practice as an example. Beardshaw was so impressed with Foster's drawings that he promoted him to the drawing department.
In 1956 Foster began study at the School of Architecture and City Planning, part of the Victoria University of Manchester. He was ineligible for a maintenance grant, so he took part-time jobs to fund his studies, including an ice-cream salesman, bouncer, and night shifts at a bakery making crumpets. During this time, he also studied at the local library in Levenshulme. His talent and hard work was recognised in 1959 when he won £105 and a RIBA silver medal for what he described as "a measured drawing of a windmill". The windmill he drew was Bourn Windmill, Cambridgeshire. After graduating in 1961, Foster won the Henry Fellowship to the Yale School of Architecture in New Haven, Connecticut, where he met future business partner Richard Rogers and earned his master's degree. At the suggestion of Yale art historian Vincent Scully, the pair travelled across America for a year to study architecture.
In 1963 Foster returned to the UK and established his own architectural firm Team 4, with Rogers, Su Brumwell, and the sisters Georgie and Wendy Cheesman. Among their first projects was the Cockpit, a minimalist glass bubble installed in Cornwall, the features of which became a recurring theme in Foster's future projects. After the four separated in 1967, Foster and Wendy founded a new practice, Foster Associates. From 1968 to 1983, Foster collaborated with American architect Richard Buckminster Fuller on several projects that became catalysts in the development of an environmentally sensitive approach to design, such as the Samuel Beckett Theatre at St Peter's College, Oxford.
Foster Associates concentrated on industrial buildings until 1969, when the practice worked on the administrative and leisure centre for Fred. Olsen Lines based in the London Docklands, which integrated workers and managers within the same office space. This was followed, in 1970, by the world's first inflatable office building for Computer Technology Limited near Hemel Hempstead, which housed 70 employees for a year. The practice's breakthrough project in England followed in 1974 with the completion of the Willis Faber & Dumas headquarters in Ipswich, commissioned in 1970 and completed in 1975. The client, a family-run insurance company, wanted to restore a sense of community to the workplace. In response, Foster designed a space with modular, open plan office floors, long before open-plan became the norm, and placed a roof garden, 25-metre swimming pool, and gymnasium in the building to enhance the quality of life for the company's 1,200 employees. The building has a full-height glass façade moulded to the medieval street plan and contributes drama, subtly shifting from opaque, reflective black to a glowing back-lit transparency as the sun sets. The design was inspired by the Daily Express Building in Manchester that Foster had admired as a youngster. The building is now Grade I listed. The Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, an art gallery and museum on the campus of the University of East Anglia, Norwich, was one of the first major public buildings to be designed by Foster, completed in 1978, and became grade II* listed in December 2012.
In 1981, Foster received a commission for the construction of a new terminal building at London's Stansted Airport. Executed by Foster + Partners, the building, recognised as a landmark work of high-tech architecture, was opened to the public in 1991, and was awarded the 1990 European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture / Mies van der Rohe Award. As part of the project's development, in 1988 Foster and British artist Brian Clarke made several proposals for an integral stained glass artwork for the terminal building; the principal proposal would have seen the walls of the terminal's east and west elevations clad in two sequences of traditionally mouth-blown, leaded glass. For complex technical and security reasons, the original scheme, which Clarke considered to be his magnum opus, couldn't be executed. Though unrealised, the collaboration is historically significant for its scale, its introduction of colour and materials broadly viewed as antithetical to high-tech architecture into a key work of that movement, and for having been the first time in the history of stained glass that computer-assisted design had been utilised in the creative process.