Norman Foster’s Empire of Image Control
There are architects whose fees are far higher than Foster’s. Bjarke Ingels told me that he’d seen competition details that allowed him to compare Foster’s proposed fees with those of a celebrated European competitor: the other architect asked for three times as much. In Ingels’s description, Foster + Partners can be thought of as Mercedes, rather than as “hand-built Aston Martin craziness.”
Sudjic, the Foster biographer, recently said that Foster’s career “dissolved the barrier between the kind of architecture that architecture magazines look at and all the rest.” Of course, Foster never stopped pressing for high-prestige commissions. And, in the mid-nineties, the firm won a series of major competitions, including for the Reichstag, the British Museum, and the Millennium Bridge. Foster soon won the Pritzker and was ennobled. He’d previously been knighted, and, separately, appointed for life to the Order of Merit, an élite cultural coterie of twenty-four, chosen by the reigning monarch. In this role, Foster used to regularly lunch with the Queen, along with Tom Stoppard, David Attenborough, and David Hockney. They now all meet with the King.
Foster’s second marriage, to Sabiha Rumani Malik, ended in 1995. A year later, he married Elena Foster, who has told a friend that, on the couple’s first date, he played her videos about Buckminster Fuller. (Norman denies this.) At this time, Foster’s firm employed two hundred and fifty people; by 2004, it was six hundred. Graham Phillips, recalling this expansion—before there was a Design Board or a corporate partner—described an office a little strained by growth, and, in his view, by Ken Shuttleworth’s self-reliance. Whereas most of the firm’s senior architects were in constant, neurotic contact with Foster, Shuttleworth, who was experimenting with curvaceous forms, “tended to get on with it,” Phillips said. As a result, some designs “slipped through the net” of review and revision, including the one for City Hall, by the Thames. It was technically brilliant, Phillips said. Its bulbous shape allowed it to minimize direct sunlight, reducing energy costs, even as its all-glass skin enacted a metaphor of transparency. But “a lot of us in the company thought it was quite hideous,” Phillips said. “Norman didn’t like it.” Ken Livingstone, the first London mayor to use the building, called it a glass testicle. It is no longer the seat of London government, and its owners recently secured permission to radically reshape it. Similarly, the Gherkin, which has become a symbol of London, was unpopular in Battersea. “It wasn’t a pretty shape, and I don’t think Norman ever thought it was,” Phillips said.
In January, 2003, Shuttleworth gave an interview to Marcus Fairs for Building, a trade publication. After the conversation had 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?”
“Everything comes from the office,” Shuttleworth replied. “We work together, we’ll all be toying with ideas with Norman and the others.” He added, “Having said that, a lot of the sketches and the initial ideas have come from me. Swiss Re, for example.” He said that he’d taken the lead in the firm’s World Trade Center proposal, in which two towers touched, or “kissed,” at their summits.
“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 the credit. That’s fine. He owns the company. He’s the chairman. He had the guts to set the company up in the first place; he put his reputation on the line.”
It’s an insight into the Foster + Partners culture that these remarks registered, internally, as an outrage. As Shuttleworth recently recalled, “Everybody was a bit upset about it. I never intended to upset the apple cart. It’s just the way it came out.” He apologized to Foster and to other colleagues. Yet Phillips remembered a meeting, involving Foster and others, at which Shuttleworth’s penitence went only so far: he declined an opportunity to agree that he’d said anything that was untrue. “Norman got up from the table and walked away and never spoke to him again,” Phillips said.
Shuttleworth recalled no such scene. And he and Foster continued to communicate. But, in Shuttleworth’s memory, the office atmosphere became “tetchy.” By the end of the year, he’d left to set up his own firm.
In October, 2004, the Gherkin won the Stirling Prize, given annually to a single British building. The same week, the latest in a series of books cataloguing Foster’s career, and compiled by the firm, was published. This volume included the 2002 group photo. But Shuttleworth was no longer standing at Foster’s shoulder. He’d been moved along five places, and Phillips occupied his former spot.
Shuttleworth, who recalled this demotion with a good-natured reference to Stalin, told me that Foster must have approved this fakery, which became a small news story. At the time, the company acknowledged the edit without apology, noting that “not all key staff” were present at the original shoot. (Phillips had been out of the country.) In an e-mail, Foster recently said that the edit had been made “to ensure accuracy.”
Today, Shuttleworth has moved on from the kind of architecture he did in his final years at Foster + Partners—a period when, as he puts it, he threw away his T-square. Across the profession, he said, “we were all trying to out-shape each other.” He has since repented. The default should be a box. “Make them square,” he told me. “Make them very low energy, not a lot of glass.”
Today, when Foster talks about doing “more with less,” it can sometimes be hard to see the less. He used Fuller’s phrase when he was at the top of 270 Park Avenue. Foster + Partners is currently working on several airports, three of them in Saudi Arabia. It’s working on other Gulf-state monuments, and various structures for Western billionaires: besides Kenneth Griffin, these include Larry Ellison, of Oracle (an Oxford research campus in his name), and Bill Ackman, the right-wing financier married to Neri Oxman, the designer (a penthouse on Central Park West; a house on Long Island). Not long ago, a consultant who worked on the façade of the Bloomberg building in London joked to a professional associate that, given the budget, he could have clad the building in Ferraris. British authorities recently blocked proposals for a Foster + Partners-designed observation tower, in London, right next to the Gherkin, in the form of a thousand-foot concrete Q-tip. (The firm claimed, weakly, to be driven by “a desire to take public engagement with the city to a new level.”) When I asked Foster about the two-kilometre tower in Riyadh—first reported by the Architects’ Journal, but not publicly acknowledged by the firm—he apologized for not being able to discuss it, or take me into a nearby room where renderings were on the walls. He made a couple of general observations: in towers reaching new heights, it might be possible to have “a perfect energy balance, where you’re too cold at the top and too hot at the bottom—so it’s a great cycle.” Separately, he proposed that wind shear might not be the issue you’d imagine, because, “with altitude, the wind force reduces.” (This observation was puzzling: with increasing altitude, air density decreases, but this is usually more than counterbalanced by higher wind speeds.)
Foster is an unmatched leader of architects. He can look less confident, even a bit exposed, in the role he now often assumes: that of a techno-optimistic guide to issues of sustainability and development. An oddity of Foster’s public persona, as a speechmaker and an occasional writer, is that he seems to seek recognition less for what he has done—which is to have caused half of the world’s most powerful people to pay for buildings that aren’t depressing—and more for what he has largely not done. He talks of modular housing, or of making cities more walkable.
Foster proposed to me that there was an “ecological” argument for the Millau Viaduct, because it had reduced severe local traffic jams. That’s not an ecological argument. (He later claimed that the bridge generated carbon savings by shortening a major trade route, but he did so without reference to the carbon released in making the bridge, or to the phenomenon of “induced demand,” by which road improvements inspire greater road use.) Foster risks discrediting the case worth making for such a bridge—one that sets carbon costs against societal benefits that may include quieter local roads and the survival of a beautiful-things department. Several years ago, the Norman Foster Foundation attracted media coverage for proposals about drone-delivery infrastructure in the developing world. Foster’s drawings showed undulating brick canopies—and no walls. The goal was to have one of these arched “droneports” in “every small town in Africa” by 2030. No working buildings of this kind exist. When a drone-delivery company did begin operating in Rwanda, it used an ordinary-looking warehouse that can be locked up at night.
More recently, the foundation helped develop a prototype for emergency houses made with walls of canvas stiffened with cement. Each was projected to cost more than fifteen thousand dollars. Foster’s main rationale for this sturdy design was a claim that the average stay in a refugee camp is seventeen years. That number has currency on the Internet, and Foster repeated it to me several times, but it is wildly inflated. When challenged, Foster said that it would be more accurate to say that refugees live “under canvas” for an average of ten to fifteen years. He was now referring to a World Bank estimate, covering the period since the end of the Cold War, about the median duration of a refugee’s time in exile. But this estimate is about displacement—including people experiencing a lifetime’s displacement—and not about time “under canvas” in camps. (The foundation has recently shifted its attention to more permanent housing made in a similar way.)
In January, 2024, in Madrid, the Norman Foster Institute, a new part of the foundation, welcomed two dozen international students in a Sustainable Cities program—a one-year course for “civic leaders of the future.” Some introductory events were held at the Foundation’s town house, which holds much of Foster’s archive of drawings, sketchbooks, and models. Alongside this building, in a courtyard, stands a beautiful mirror-ceilinged pavilion, designed by Foster; the students gathered there for lectures given by Aravena, Foster, and others. The optics were odd for a sustainability gathering: the pavilion could be mistaken for an exhibition celebrating fossil fuels. A cabinet holds models of every aircraft type that Foster has ever flown, including the jets. At one end, there’s a full-scale version, commissioned by Foster, of a Dymaxion—the lozenge-shaped three-wheeled car designed by Buckminster Fuller in the nineteen-thirties, and generally understood to be a death trap. (Foster isn’t so sure.) Hanging on the longest wall is a thirty-foot model of the Beijing airport terminal, which Foster + Partners finished in 2008; measured by floor area—more than ten million square feet—it’s one of the largest buildings in the world.
