The British architect has built an unprecedented factory of fine design. Inside the world of the man who creates exquisite monuments for ultra-wealthy clients.
Foster, who since 1999 has been Lord Foster of Thames Bank, is eighty-nine, unusually fit, and very carefully dressed—suggesting a dapper gentleman on the edge of a Fellini scene. He spends part of every year on Martha’s Vineyard, on a thirty-acre compound that he bought in 2011. There, on a late morning last July, he was on his second bike ride of the day. His first, at dawn, had taken him down quiet local roads for a little less than his usual thirty miles. He then returned home for video calls with some of the twenty-four hundred colleagues who, in eighteen offices in twelve countries, work at Foster + Partners, the firm he founded, where he is both a kind of brand ambassador and, still, a design leader. Foster sat at a long glass table of his own design, on which he’d arranged his paperwork, in a neat grid of neat piles. Each pile was a project then under way. Together, the piles represented real-estate investments of at least twenty billion dollars.
Foster + Partners isn’t the largest architectural firm in the world, but it’s by far the largest that has a Pritzker Prize winner in its name. Its best-known work includes Apple’s ring-shaped headquarters, in Cupertino, California; the glass replacement dome on the Reichstag building, in Berlin; and the Hearst Tower, whose diagonally intersecting panels emerge from a six-story Art Deco stone façade in midtown Manhattan. (The firm’s New York office is halfway up.) But Foster’s overarching achievement is his company. He traded on a refined reputation without losing it; he built an architectural machine that could execute acclaimed, precise work at an unprecedentedly high volume. Foster was the first in the profession to dismantle the distinction between two kinds of architectural success: that of the architect-auteur (giving furrowed attention to a few exceptional projects—cathedrals and concert halls) and that of the big, anonymous corporate practice (designing the malls, towers, hospitals, and rail stations that fill up much of the space that remains). Foster’s production line spits out dozens of structures every year. These will include hospitals and rail stations but also, say, a luxury yacht, or an open-air chapel, for the Vatican, on the Venetian island of San Giorgio Maggiore.
To build a very large operation that still resembles a boutique one required decades of sustained control. Foster has controlled the work, and controlled his image, and controlled the images made by him: a Foster + Partners project will almost always have its accompanying Norman Foster sketches, often made retrospectively, rather than in the heat of design. They’ll be annotated by Foster, in a spiky hand that some of his colleagues have learned to imitate. These images may show a building’s future users spreading their arms above their heads, in a gesture of joyous abandon that it’s hard to imagine Foster ever having made.
His architectural preferences have an impact, however subtle, on the millions of people who pass through his airports, galleries, lobbies, and Apple Stores each week: grays and whites, columns and porticoes, glass and steel. It’s an architecture of orderliness and long sight lines. Foster’s friend and sometime client Sir Stuart Lipton, a London property developer, recently classified the aesthetic under the approving heading of “soft modernism.” These buildings rarely disappoint the people who pay for them—who pay more, but not outrageously more, than for the budget option—and they don’t insult the people who use them. Not every structure produced by Foster’s system is a triumph. Graham Phillips, a former managing director at Foster + Partners, recently told me that his boss once called the firm’s rounded London City Hall building, completed in 2002, an “ugly fucker.” (Foster denies this.) And Foster can be challenged about the ethics of certain clients, in Gulf countries and elsewhere, and on the depth of his declared commitment to sustainability. But, after all this time, surprisingly little of Foster’s output seems half-baked, or absurdly pliant to the whims of wealth, and a lot of it draws you into his optimism: the work makes you glad, while you’re there, that you’re not somewhere else.
In the view of Carl Abbott, an American architect who was a contemporary of Foster’s in graduate school, at Yale, no architect has ever designed more public buildings of significance than Foster. Bjarke Ingels, the Danish architect with a growing international practice, recently suggested to me that “to disseminate your own sense of identity into such a large organization is an incredible feat.” He said that Foster shares with Steven Spielberg an ability to deliver “massive blockbusters that are also aesthetically and artistically successful.” (Rem Koolhaas, he added, resembled Stanley Kubrick.) Others have expressed similar thoughts, but with more regret. Piers Taylor, a British architect and writer, has argued that Foster’s dominance indicates a profession that has no place for “the quirky, the interesting, the whimsical, the brazen, the eccentric.” Admirers and critics might agree that Foster’s reach, along with his appreciation of perfect finishes—tidy, tapered edges—makes him more comparable to a product-design innovator like Apple or Volkswagen than to another architectural star. Some years ago, Foster was asked to contribute to a TV series about favorite buildings. He chose the jumbo jet.
Foster’s second ride was on a water-bike: a bicycle, mounted high between two parallel floats, with pedals that turn a propeller at the rear. (As I’d learned, via a firm word from Elena Ochoa Foster—an art-book publisher, with a Ph.D. in psychology, who married Norman thirty years ago, and is now Lady Foster—such a vehicle should not be called a pedal boat, or pedalo, which is something likelier to have the head of a flamingo.) Foster moved across a pond of brackish water that reaches from the bottom of his lawn to a sandbar two miles away, beyond which the ocean can be heard but not seen. He pedalled into the wind, never pausing. As Foster once put it to Stephen Bayley, a London friend, in a discussion about the unrelenting nature of his career, “You’ve got to keep going. You’ve got to keep going.”
On the pond, in a conversation held over the choppy water between a water-bike and a guest water-bike, Foster lost little of the reticence and formality that he has on land. He talks, as he designs, largely without irony or rhetorical heat. He has a habit of hedging—“as it were,” “in a way”—and, though his memory seems very good, he’d rather refer to himself in montage voice-over than in detailed reminiscence or reflection. (Describing early trips in America: “Whether it was Rothko, whether it was the Modern Jazz Quartet, whether it was going to Cape Canaveral . . .”) Foster expects to reach the end of his paragraphs, and talks over attempted interruptions with unmusical steeliness. “He’s not the easiest person to be with,” Bayley noted. “I think there’s a performance going on, all the time.” But, in exchanges that Foster and I had in the course of several months last year, he was always friendly, in the way of a tolerant monarch, and there was no real sign of the snappishness that his colleagues have sometimes observed: Foster once advised a young architect who’d disappointed him to become a potato farmer. (Foster doesn’t recall this.)
On the water, Foster mentioned that in 1999, while biking through a Bavarian forest shortly before a Wagner concert, he had reconsidered the firm’s published design for a new Wembley Stadium, in London.He decided that the stadium’s roof should be held up by a soaring tilted arch rather than by four masts. The displaced design was “honorable” but unexceptional. (Similar masts could be seen above Richard Rogers’s Millennium Dome, then nearing completion in East London.) When Foster proposed this revision to Ken Bates, the famously ill-humored British soccer executive who was then running the Wembley project, he sought to allay concerns about cost with a gnomic phrase that he still uses today: “Quality is an attitude of mind.” Foster told me that when he next visited Bates, there was a framed quotation on the wall. “ ‘Quality is an attitude of mind’—Ken Bates.” (Bates, now ninety-three, told me that he didn’t recall this. He praised Foster’s work while remembering him as “a bit bossy.”)
Foster also touched on the work he’d done on the Martha’s Vineyard property, which included renovating the clapboard main house, and, later, building a poolside pavilion nearby for displaying art and hanging out. Contractors had removed what Foster thought was an absurd amount of wiring running inside, and between, the property’s several buildings, which include a boathouse. This infrastructure, he decided, must have been related to communications and security for President Barack Obama and his family, who took summer vacations there, between 2009 and 2011. Foster told me that when he later met Obama, at a neighbor’s home, he had to resist the President’s jokey pressure to be allowed to keep renting. Obama “was quite amusing about it,” Foster recalled, but had to be told, “Sadly, no.”
We returned to shore and walked up past the main house, largely built thirty years ago by someone who, according to the Vineyard Gazette, wanted a replica of the farmhouse in “Field of Dreams.” We didn’t spot what Elena Foster had called her “robot friend”—an autonomous lawnmower that supposedly discomforts Canada geese. After crossing a white gravel drive, we entered a tunnel of foliage, then emerged in a clearing containing the pavilion, and also Elena Foster, who was sitting outdoors on a white sofa beneath a steel roof, painted white.
Norman was wearing white and beige; Elena was all in white. She was finishing a call with Paola Foster, the older of their two children. Paola, who’s working on a graduate architecture degree at Yale, was eating supper in Berlin. Her brother, Eduardo, who works in real-estate development, was in Ibiza. The siblings grew up largely in Switzerland, where Foster has claimed residency for nearly twenty years. Their mother, who is Spanish, had earlier said that they think of themselves as “about eighty per cent British.” (In Foster’s fond phrasing, they speak “all of the languages.”) Foster has four sons from his first marriage, who are decades older, and don’t work with buildings. It’s possible that one or both of the younger children will join Foster + Partners. “All options are open,” Foster told me.
We sat by a long, dark swimming pool framed by gray wooden decking. A young woman served champagne and fried calamari. Foster mentioned a building of his, in Manchester, England, that he was proud of: a support center for cancer patients made with a pitched roof and a lot of wood, in the hope of creating a less institutional mood. This comment prompted Elena to remember a trip they’d taken fifteen years ago to a nearby part of that city. The makers of a documentary about Foster—written and presented by Deyan Sudjic, the British author of an approved Foster biography—had secured access to Foster’s childhood home. This is a two-story Victorian red-brick row house in what was, in Foster’s youth, a wholly working-class neighborhood. For the first time in decades, he’d revisited his old bedroom. It faces a railway embankment on which trains still pass, as they did in his childhood, on the main route between Manchester and London. Elena, who is energetically involved in Foster’s professional life, watched the filming that day, and recalled being surprised by his seeming equilibrium, under what she had assumed would be weighty emotions.
“Norman reacted amazingly well,” she said. “I couldn’t do it. I think it’s because you don’t have ghosts, Norman.”
He smiled and quietly said, “I never really thought about it.” The contrasts in the marriage can sometimes seem derived from hackneyed national stereotypes about introversion and extroversion. Elena used to host a popular Spanish TV show called “Let’s Talk About Sex.”
“I think your mum, your family, was very nice with you,” she said. She added, not unkindly, “Your tiny family.” Foster, an only child, had previously told me that he experienced his childhood “in a kind of bubble”—by which he seemed to mean self-reliant solitude more than loneliness. But he has also talked of being bullied at school. His parents died in the nineteen-seventies, and never visited a finished building designed by their son.
Foster owns work by L. S. Lowry, the twentieth-century Manchester-born artist whose best-known paintings show urban landscapes filled with dozens of small, barely differentiated figures on the move—looking a little like the people in an architectural rendering. Foster told me that steam trains used to rattle his bedroom window. He said that he could see passengers’ faces, but his attention was on the engines. “I had a love affair with locomotives, all mechanical things,” he said. He was delighted by cutaway illustrations showing the insides of machines. A drawing of his bedroom view was in the portfolio that secured him admission to an architecture course at the University of Manchester, in 1956, when he was twenty-one—years after he’d left school and begun working in local government.
Earlier that day, on the deck surrounding the “Field of Dreams” house, Elena had said that, when her relationship with Norman started, in the mid-nineties, she sometimes found things “hard work.”
Her husband laughed but didn’t look entirely comfortable: “What do you mean?”
“You were architecture, architecture,” she said. She recalled once instructing him to put down his pencil and pay attention to her. Foster tends to keep a cloth-covered sketchbook nearby. He had protested that he’d been listening to her carefully, and could repeat what she’d just said. Elena replied, “I need you to hear me with your eyes!”
Now, by the pool, she added that things were certainly easier today. He’ll greet guests, have a drink. Even on occasions when he’s clearly eager to resume working, Elena said, “he’s able to wait.”
“Progress,” Foster said.
Paco Rojas, who has himself returned to Seville, used to work in one of the several buildings that make up the company’s riverside headquarters in Battersea, in southwest London. This is the “Thames Bank” in Foster’s noble title. The company moved there in 1990, in part because it’s a short walk to London’s only heliport. Foster could fly in from his country home in Wiltshire; he could dash off to one site meeting after another. The offices don’t close at night, or on Christmas. Once, when I met Foster there, we sat at a round table he often uses at one end of a very long, double-height room in the main building, from where it’s easy to proselytize, as he has often done, for open-plan offices, open-plan libraries, and open-plan schools; his nearest co-workers were dots on the horizon.
Rojas worked mostly on Apple Stores, including one built on its own little island in a waterfront development in Singapore—a glass hemisphere that would look familiar to anyone who knows Foster’s much loved reconstruction of the Reichstag, finished in 1999. Rojas described Foster as a dominant but largely unseen figure. The founder tended to appear on Rojas’s floor only at moments of crisis. During such visits, Rojas said, his colleagues were unrecognizable in their quietness. “Everyone, not just my boss, but three levels higher” registered the risk of an unnecessary remark, he said. “You don’t want to interrupt his thinking, or have people say you’re wasting his time.” A project revision might happen in a delirium of all-night and weekend work. Rojas’s recollections weren’t peevish—fine work was produced under these conditions. But he also saw some peers gradually change character. “You become a solid wall,” he said. “It was ‘Nothing is going to hurt me. Keep your insides strong.’ ”
I sometimes thought of Rojas when, last summer, I joined a few of Foster’s video meetings with colleagues. Sometimes his interventions were specific and small-scale: he asked about the legibility of the lettering on the exterior of a school theatre in Connecticut, and about the parking lot out front. “Not to distract us now, but just consider if the neck to that car park was tightened,” he said. At other times, Foster’s interventions had more drama. Once, invoking Roger Ridsdill Smith, the firm’s most senior structural engineer, he said of a tower design, “I think I’d pull Roger in and look at it being a balanced cantilever.” I identified a catchphrase: “It’s worth a study.” You could almost hear the dinner reservations being cancelled.
His remarks never sounded capricious; nor did they seem unwelcome. This is the core of the business: people draw ten versions of a stairway, or a lobby, and agree to develop the best one, and then someone—possibly Lord Foster—starts to wonder about an eleventh version. Foster is very good at designing. But he’s also very good at making others not stop designing.
In the early sixties, when Foster was at Yale, he was surprised to discover that, unlike his classmates, he had assistants. “Without any conscious move on my part, I attracted undergraduates who would then be almost a part of my team,” he told me. “People would ferret me out and say, ‘Can I help?’ ” (Carl Abbott, Foster’s Yale contemporary, confirms this.) Foster recalled a cheerful heckle he once heard while presenting a project to classmates: “Why don’t you put more people on it, Norman?”
This points to the future empire. Ken Shuttleworth, a former senior colleague, now with his own practice, fell out with Foster twenty years ago, after Shuttleworth was perceived to have taken too much public credit for some of the company’s turn-of-the-millennium hits—including a London office tower, shaped like a cartoon rocket ship, that is now known by almost everyone as the Gherkin, and by Foster as the “so-called Gherkin.” But Shuttleworth still describes his old boss as “very charismatic, someone you’d follow off a cliff,” and as a remarkably astute critic of designs. “He’d always push you beyond where you thought you needed to go,” he said. Crucially, Foster understood that a good time for a radical revision (if not the most prudent time, economically) might be long after everyone had settled on a scheme. By that point, a team of architects is fully immersed in a project’s constraints and possibilities. “That’s a good time to throw everything away and start again,” Shuttleworth said.
Graham Phillips, the former managing director, joined Foster in the mid-seventies, and at first had thirty colleagues. When he left, in 2008, there were more than a thousand. He recently told me that he was as stressed out on his last day as he was on his first. The boss’s scrutiny could feel relentless: “If you were senior, you could be phoned in the middle of the night.” Phillips is thankful to have worked for a “creative genius,” and thinks of Foster as someone who might have easily become one of the tech billionaires of our era. He’s also thankful that his time at the firm is over. He struggled to remember an occasion when he’d had a conversation with Foster that wasn’t directly about work. After a big competition win, when colleagues were ready to celebrate, “Norman would never relax. He’d be focussed on talking about the next meeting, the next project.” For years after the headquarters moved to Battersea, Foster maintained a vast apartment on the office’s top floor, which was furnished with little but a seventy-foot mural by the artist Richard Long. Phillips, speaking in an appalled tone that was only half-joking, said, “He lived there, above the shop. That was the terrible thing. He could just come downstairs on a Sunday morning to make sure somebody’s working.”
But at the start of the millennium—not long after Foster survived bowel cancer and a heart attack—he began remaking his firm into something better suited to its expanding volume of commissions, and better equipped to outlive him. He calls this period a “rebirth.” One consequence has been a withdrawal from some daily decision-making and some time to work on the foundation, which is led by him and Elena—and also to rack up cross-country-skiing marathons, and to design an art work for the new tower that his firm has designed for JPMorgan in New York.
In 2003, Foster split most of the architectural staff into six studios, and put a long-serving partner at the head of each. All six partners are based in London, and, so far, all have been men. The studios share access to the many in-house engineers, model-makers, materials experts, and other specialists. (As Foster put it to me, “Architecture is too important to be left to architects alone.”) The studios have no declared geographical or typological bias; there isn’t an airports studio, or an East Asia studio; the firm can offer new hires a reasonable promise of variety. Given the company’s size, each studio would, if standing alone, be a force in world architecture. A decade ago, while Studio 4 was leading work on the Bloomberg building in London (a million square feet; more than a billion dollars), it was also contributing to Apple Park, in California (a mile in circumference; three million square feet; an estimated cost of five billion dollars).
Foster also established a Design Board, a ten-member version of his former self—the one that haunted the office on weekends. Today, the firm starts work on forty or fifty new projects a year. The board monitors all of them, including those that will falter before being realized (after a competition loss, perhaps, or a client’s change of heart). Members query designs for three to five hours each weekday, in a Supreme Court term that never ends. As Armstrong Yakubu, who’s on the board, recently explained, “It might be: Why do you have a huge staircase? Wouldn’t it be better as a ramp?” He added, “You’d think architects should know it. They do know it, but they’re moving at a great pace.” He added, with good humor, that, if he has a bit less Foster in his daily life than he did thirty years ago, “it doesn’t feel like that when he’s sending you one sketch after another.” Nowadays, those sketches arrive as e-mailed or texted photographs of something he’s drawn in a sketchbook. Before, Foster used to fax, a lot. (One partner told me, “The fax was a nightmare.”)
In 2007, Foster sold a large part of his ownership in the firm to 3i, a British private-equity company, in a transaction that also created many new partners. That deal, which gave 3i forty per cent of the company, enabled investment in overseas offices, particularly in China. And it made Foster rich at a new level. The details aren’t public, but the company was valued at several hundred million dollars, and Foster owned most of it. Today, after a second sale, a Canadian investment firm is the largest shareholder, with a fifty-per-cent stake, and two hundred and twenty-six Foster partners each own a slice. Recent growth has been in the Gulf. In the U.K. tax year ending in April, 2024, Foster + Partners earned more than half a billion dollars in fees, forty per cent of which was paid by Middle Eastern clients.
Around the time of the 3i deal, Foster became a legal resident of Switzerland, where he’d bought an eighteenth-century château with a view of Lake Geneva. (During this period, the family’s other properties included a cliffside house that Foster had radically remodelled—with eighteen-ton sliding doors, and another Richard Long—in Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, one of France’s most expensive real-estate markets.) By then, Foster had begun spending much of the year outside the U.K. By formalizing his absence, he likely gained a tax advantage: non-resident British citizens don’t pay U.K. taxes on worldwide earnings. Foster’s emigration elicited some criticism, and in 2010 a new law established that non-resident peers could no longer sit or vote in the House of Lords. (Foster had spoken in the Lords only once.)
In Foster’s own framing, he’s now familiar with every Foster + Partners commission, “but I get immersed in some projects more than others.” Countering strong claims I’d heard to the contrary, he told me that I wouldn’t be able to detect that distinction by looking at the firm’s contracts—that is, you can’t buy extra Norman. He added that the standard deal restrains a client’s ability to refer to him in its marketing without permission. He sounded disappointed when I told him that the Mriya resort, in Crimea, a Foster + Partners design with a little Reichstag-like glass cupola at the meeting point of four wings, has a bar called the Foster Club. (The resort, owned by a now sanctioned Russian bank, was under construction when Russia invaded Crimea, in 2014, and was finished without Foster’s oversight.) According to the hotel’s Web site: “The city falls asleep, Foster wakes up.”
Foster’s personal attention to a project may derive from a personal connection. A civic-and-commercial building that’s about to break ground in St. Moritz, Switzerland, is near the mountain home that he now describes as his primary residence. (The château is on the market.) There are also commissions whose cultural standing, or budget, makes it inevitable that they’ll attract more of the founder’s attention than—to quote Foster’s Web site—“an exciting new residential development” in Dubai “that seeks to redefine luxury living.”
Steve Jobs left little to chance. In August, 2008, Foster and his wife were being driven home from the Geneva airport when the London office called: “There’s a Mr. Jobs, wants your personal number. Can I give it to him?” Foster said yes. A few minutes later: “I need your help in Cupertino. How quickly can you get out here?” Norman said that he’d have to check with Elena and call him back; the couple had just agreed to take a break from travelling. Elena’s view was that Jobs was surely speaking to other firms—arranging a “beauty parade” of architects—and that Norman should dispatch a senior colleague. Norman called Jobs back. “I’m not talking to anyone else!” Jobs said. Foster spoke to Elena again, and to Jobs again. The Fosters had pizza in Jobs’s kitchen two weeks later.
The lobby used to look out on the base of the Union Carbide Building, a 1960 modernist skyscraper designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. Between 2019 and 2021, that tower was dismantled, over objections made on both architectural and embodied-carbon grounds. At the time, no taller building in the world had ever been demolished, except in the 9/11 attacks. Foster + Partners’ replacement tower, at 270 Park Avenue, reached its full height in November, 2023, and became the sixth tallest in the city. It fills the block between Madison and Park, and between Forty-seventh and Forty-eighth Streets; its upper floors taper in a series of setbacks, and resemble a rising-and-falling bar graph when seen from either north or south. Foster attended a topping-out ceremony for the tower, alongside Governor Kathy Hochul, Mayor Eric Adams, and others, and addressed a crowd of workers who’d built the tower. The event, Foster had told me, was, “in the best sense, very American—very celebratory, very outgoing and chauvinistic and nationalistic.” JPMorgan intends to start moving in this summer.
David Arena, JPMorgan’s head of global real estate, who has an old-fashioned, sunny hustle about him, was with Foster in the lobby. Arena told him that he looked terrific, which was true. In the previous two weeks, Foster had been camping in Zambia, briefly in the company of the President of Zambia, and had then spent a week with Elena and their children, and some of their children’s friends, in a villa on Lake Como—the same one where, in “Succession,” Lukas Matsson receives visits from members of the Roy family. Foster was tanned and wearing a pale linen suit, navy loafers, and mustard-yellow socks. This was his attire for a site visit across the street, but also for lunch, later, with Elena at the Grill, which used to be the bar space of the Four Seasons restaurant, in Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building. (Foster, a longtime regular, told me that he’d first visited there as a Yale student, in a group that included James Stirling, the British architect, then teaching at the university, and Richard Rogers, Foster’s British classmate and a future business partner. Twenty-five years later, the three would be the subjects of the “New Architecture” exhibition at the Royal Academy in London.)
Foster had been joined by several colleagues, but Nigel Dancey, a lead partner on the JPMorgan project, was in London, recovering from an illness. His absence was a slight complication. Foster is adept at taking easy ownership of every proposal or project. At times, this posture will derive from prolonged oversight, as was true here. At other times, Foster will be in head-of-state mode: he will have brought himself up to speed in the car carrying him from the airport to the presentation, with the kind of brinkmanship that Ken Shuttleworth used to find extraordinarily skillful, if “heart-stopping.” (Shuttleworth supposes that Foster could have easily outperformed most British politicians, had he chosen that path.) Either way, Foster is never presenting himself as a design’s sole author, or as a repository of knowledge about every vent and contractor deadline. So it’s good for him to have a company chaperon with a thousand drawings on an iPad. Two younger partners had taken Dancey’s place. These were high-achieving, mid-career architects whose contribution to the Manhattan skyline is now easily picked out from deep in Queens. But they’d never had exactly this role before, and looked nervous to the point of queasiness. At one point, one of them quietly asked their boss if he was doing it right.
As we talked, near a model of the new tower, several JPMorgan executives passed by, perhaps not by chance, and said hello. (A bystander might have judged Foster, and not the bank, to be the powerful client.) The well-wishers included Daniel Pinto, an executive junior only to the C.E.O., Jamie Dimon. “So it’s almost done, right?” Pinto said, pleasantly, adding that he had some thoughts about the choice of art works on the upper floors. “We need to find the right size for the right walls,” he said. Foster had already helped to secure commissions for the building from artists he has long known, including Maya Lin and Gerhard Richter. He suggested a meeting: “Let’s find some time.”
Arena told me, “Of course, we’re risk managers, so selecting Norman as a partner was easy.” It’s fair to compliment Foster + Partners on extreme reliability, in design and execution. But Arena seemed to recognize that his praise lacked some poetry, and he added that JPMorgan had “boiled the ocean” in its search for an architect—a private competition had begun with a field of dozens. After calling Foster “arguably the greatest architect of all time,” Arena said, “When you build a building, you think: It’s going to be a sculpture! Let’s make it round, let’s make it octagonal! But Norman’s view has been, from the beginning: The street grid is orthogonal, the zoning is set up a particular way, let’s make it look like it wants to look, in the urban context.” (The zoning rules that first produced progressive, “wedding cake” setbacks, like those of the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building, were rewritten long ago, but that silhouette puts you in good company.) Arena added that he and his colleagues had been impressed by a Foster + Partners tower, at 425 Park Avenue, that opened a few years ago, and is half occupied by Citadel, the hedge fund, and its trading arm. Kenneth Griffin, Citadel’s C.E.O., is now part of a team developing a third Foster tower on the strip, at 350 Park Avenue.
I later spoke to Michael Bloomberg, who remembered a call that he took from Dimon just before JPMorgan committed to Foster. Bloomberg’s low-rise, stone-clad London headquarters had opened in 2017. Bloomberg recalled, “I said, ‘Look, this guy is going to be hard to work with, because he’s got strong ideas. But, if you want somebody that really can take what you want, and translate it, he’s the guy.’ ”
We put on hard hats and walked over to the new building. It has twice the floor area of the old one, but, in addition to having a tapered top, it relents in its scale just above street level. Starting at a point about eighty feet up, the base of the tower slants inward, particularly sharply at its western and eastern ends. This should grant some breathing space for pedestrians on the avenues. It also creates engineering drama. Below where this pinching begins, thick structural columns that run down the building’s façade also turn inward, with what seems like rashness, and meet up with the others at one of six fan-shaped junctions at ground level. Arena, keen to reassure me about the design’s stability, noted that the new building used more steel at its base than its predecessor had used over all. Foster, speaking moments later, had a different agenda: he told me that he’d sold JPMorgan on the idea of diagonal bracing for the western and eastern façades by arguing in part that this would save steel.
The cantilevers and the fan junctions aren’t doing anything outlandish. One can find precursors of various kinds, including an unbuilt one in Foster’s archive, a 1978 design for a tower that would have expanded the old Whitney Museum. But the new design is still a striking, muscular performance, suggesting a plank pose, or a car up on jacks. Foster made his international name in 1986 with a headquarters, in Hong Kong, for the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation. He gave the building, then the most expensive in history, a remarkable (and, strictly speaking, unnecessary) skeleton of a stack of suspension bridges. Foster isn’t immune to the appeal of an impeccable modernist box, but he has always been drawn to stories of engineering innovation that make an implicit claim about the possibility of progress. Such stories also give permission to new forms, while protecting designs from too strong a taint of faddishness, or of strenuous icon-making. Optimism comes naturally to Foster, and is likely to please all but the most harried, cash-strapped clients.
It’s not always easy to tell a good engineering story. The firm’s Millennium Bridge, in London, is a suspension footbridge in denial about being a suspension footbridge, with cables that hang from Y-shaped, slingshot stumps rather than from taller masts, for reasons that don’t seem to go far beyond Foster’s stated desire to extend a “blade of light” across the Thames. (According to Angus Macdonald, a British historian of architecture and engineering, who respects some of Foster’s other work, the result is “squashed up” and “hideous.”) But Foster has long employed engineers, who, as he puts it, are present “at the point of creation.” This hasn’t always been typical of the profession: Stuart Lipton, the developer, recently contrasted Foster’s engineering thoughtfulness with the approach of Jørn Utzon, who designed the Sydney Opera House but “had no idea how to deliver it.” Foster, an admirer of Utzon’s, described the history of the opera house as “an object lesson in how not to design.”
Foster is skilled at making clients feel good about one or another technical novelty: the largest possible sheets of structural glass, an exotic new ventilation system, an arch holding up a stadium’s roof. And he presses manufacturers to accommodate him. Foster’s original, winning proposal for the Reichstag, which was too expensive to build, included a forty-thousand-square-foot translucent roof that covered the whole site like a tabletop. The glass elevators in the Bloomberg office operate in an unusual way that required a competition among manufacturers, and a test rig in Helsinki. The cabs are not hoisted on cables but cantilevered off the building’s façade, as if being lifted and lowered by a forklift. This was important, both client and architect impressed on me, because it allowed elevator shafts that were entirely transparent and free of clutter.
When Foster spoke at the topping-out of 270 Park Avenue, he used a telling word: he described the building as a “device.” His twin impulses toward sobriety and technical exhibitionism have resulted in a number of skyscrapers—including the tallest buildings in Frankfurt and Philadelphia—that prompt thoughts of handsomely encased light machinery, of equipment. But the JPMorgan building is a little different, in part for being darker-hued: it looks almost cast from bronze. It seems keen not to be mistaken for something sleek and silvery in a young economy. Foster, looking up at the tower from Forty-seventh Street, hinted at the complexity of discussions about which exact shade would be used for the cladding that accentuates the supporting columns and the diagonal bracing. I asked if there’d been concerns about having a bank tower of shimmering gold. “Of course,” Foster said. Part of the pitch, now reprised for me, was to establish bronze as a material of statuary. “How do you convey values of timelessness, and have something that will truly endure over time?” he said. (I later heard a colleague of Foster’s, in a video meeting, start a sentence with “If you can sell bronze to Jamie Dimon . . .”)
We walked into the new tower’s thirty-five-thousand-square-foot lobby, where Foster’s art work will stand. Arena, using the amused, self-teasing tone of someone looking down an itemized bill for maybe three billion dollars—JPMorgan declined to confirm that reported price—reflected on the travertine that surrounds the elevator banks. “It of course only comes from one place in Italy—one quarry in the whole planet,” he said. “And one guy has to match the pieces. I thought you just put it up on the wall, the way it comes out of the quarry! That’s not at all what happens. There’s one Italian guy. He lays it all out in a big warehouse, piece by piece. I think he goes by one name, like Oprah.” Looking at Foster, he added, “This does not happen at this level of beauty unless you have Norman on you, day and night.”
A construction elevator, attached to the tower’s north side, carried us to the fifty-sixth floor. We came out into a high-ceilinged, raw area that by this summer will be a gallery and a “sky bar” for client and employee events. We were about twelve hundred feet above the street. “This is man-made!” Foster said. “It’s so blindingly obvious but worth repeating. Look at this!” He sounded both sincere and a little strained, suggesting that it is more natural for him to think such things than to say them. On the east side, there was no curtain wall yet—just sky, and a waist-high barrier of wire and netting. To the south, a glass panel dangled from an unseen crane; harnessed workers, high above us, were nudging it into place. “Somebody’s controlling that—and it’s within millimetres,” Foster said. Then: “Now it’s in place! We’ve only been here a minute.”
We looked out over a hazy midtown. “Chrysler, my favorite,” Foster said. Arena joked, not quite accurately, that it was nice to “look down at all of the observation decks in the city.”
As we made our way back down, Foster said that he had never met Natalie de Blois, an architect who was key to the design of the Union Carbide Building. But he knew her building a little, recognized its strengths, and felt comfortable about its disappearance. It “was obsolescent,” he said. “It was recirculating stale refrigerated air. Low ceilings, very little natural light, no variety of space. The question that’s never raised but I think is important is: What is going to replace it? What is the idealism behind the replacement?”
At the time, Graham Phillips was an architecture student in Liverpool. The country was approaching the end of a postwar boom in publicly funded construction during which swaths of architects, employed in local government, created inexpensive housing, schools, and hospitals that generally followed a modernist template of concrete, flat roofs, and limited ornament. Phillips and his classmates swooned over photographs in professional magazines that showed Foster’s office, in a storefront on Fitzroy Street, in the West End. “We were gobsmacked,” Phillips said recently. “It had a black-glass façade—very strange, no mullions to it—and the interior was bright green and yellow, almost fluorescent. And the doors off to the side, to storerooms or toilets, were like submarine doors, with a big black gasket around them. And I can remember thinking, Well, that’s the only place I want to work.”
As Phillips would have known from the same articles, Foster, after graduating from Yale, had spent the mid-sixties at Team 4, a practice that initially involved him; Richard Rogers and his wife, Su Rogers; and two sisters, Georgie and Wendy Cheesman. Georgie left almost immediately, and went on to have her own career. In the view of Georgie’s daughter, Suke Wolton, who teaches politics at Oxford, her late mother found Foster’s self-absorption a little hard to take. “She really admired Norman, but she didn’t want to work with him. It was almost like she was palming him off on her sister: ‘You deal with him.’” Wendy stayed, and she and Norman married in 1964.
Wolton, like her mother, has respect for Foster, but she also has grating memories of time spent with Norman and Wendy and their young sons. “As far as he was concerned, the world was meant to be looking after him,” she said. “It was ‘Is it dinnertime? No? O.K., I’m off, then.’ He really thought that children should be seen and not heard.” When she was in her early teens, she told her mother that her uncle Norman was a male chauvinist pig.
Foster, whose father had been the manager of a pawnshop and later a factory worker, and whose mother worked for a while as a waitress, has explained that he had to find his own way into his career. Nobody in his family had attended college; there were no books in the house; architecture “wasn’t on the school syllabus.” This last point can be challenged: I showed Foster pages from a school notebook, full of architectural work, made by him in the late nineteen-forties, when he was thirteen. He expressed surprise about these pages—which are digitally preserved in his archive, and include architectural plans for a castle, a Tudor house, and a flat-roofed modern house with a “loggia” and a “dining recess.” A teacher had written, “An excellent notebook, keep it up.” Foster said that this schoolwork didn’t contradict his narrative of lonely architectural discovery. “There was never any connection between architecture as a school subject and the idea that one might pursue it as a profession,” he said.
Foster’s Team 4 colleagues were upper middle class and privately educated. The Cheesmans had kept horses. Foster left school at sixteen, to work as a trainee civil servant in Manchester Town Hall. Later, he paid his way through his first degree with unskilled jobs—at a movie theatre, in an auto shop—and resented it, acquiring what he once described as “a strong desire to show everyone some day.” Foster’s disadvantages were real, but the advantages of his colleagues helped to establish the firm. One of Team 4’s first commissions was a retirement home for Su Rogers’s parents. Most of the firm’s work involved elegant single-family homes. One of these, in Hertfordshire, had at its core a long, open-plan, multilevel room that steps down a gentle slope. It was used as a gruesome location in Kubrick’s “A Clockwork Orange,” where it was given a Beethoven’s Fifth doorbell.
Team 4 broke up, sourly, in 1967. Norman and Wendy set up a new firm, Foster Associates. In 1971, Richard Rogers, working with Renzo Piano, won a commission to design the Centre Pompidou, in Paris. Norman later reëstablished a cordial relationship with Rogers, and they had discussions about reuniting. When Foster recently talked about their different paths, he focussed for a moment on Rogers’s conspicuous ductwork, often painted bright colors, and he contrasted that with his own instinct to tuck things away, efficiently; he described the narrow-bore pipes, carrying pulsing water that can either heat or cool, inside the precast concrete walls of Apple Park. Both men were sometimes said to be forging a high-tech movement in architecture, but, as Shuttleworth, who joined Foster in the seventies, put it to me, “We were more about cool boxes. Rogers was letting it all hang out.”
In one of our conversations, Foster proposed that Rogers, who died in 2021, had “a very romantic vision of what constituted a Russian Communist state.” He remembered a loud argument over dinner. Rogers, an active supporter of the British Labour Party, was certainly to Foster’s political left. But, when I recently spoke to Ruthie Rogers, a co-founder of the long-famous River Café restaurant in London, who in 1973 became Richard’s second wife, she was surprised by Foster’s memory, and noted that her husband was certainly not pro-Soviet. Still, she spoke fondly of Foster, and recalled once watching him prepare pesto. He counted out more than a hundred basil leaves, one by one. “I remember thinking, What are you doing?” she said, adding, “He cares about food, in a Norman Foster way—which is curiosity combined with ambition, perhaps.” That is, he was asking the question “If he really got it right, would it be the best?”
Team 4’s final major commission, which received a prize in 1967, was a handsome minimalist factory and office in Swindon, west of London, largely done with cheap off-the-shelf materials. This is the kind of achievement that’s much more often discussed among architects than executed. In the years since, Foster has frequently referred to ideals of industrialized simplicity and lightness. Quoting Buckminster Fuller, the American designer and inventor, who became a friend in his later years, Foster has made a motto of the idea of doing “more with less.” That’s a fair description of both the Swindon factory and an impressively inexpensive glass-walled office building that Foster Associates designed for I.B.M. a few years later. And it perhaps applies to one of the firm’s remarkable early achievements: an office for an insurance-brokerage company, Willis Faber & Dumas, in Ipswich, on the eastern coast of England.
What could have been a drab ten-story block surrounded by pavement instead became a low, deep, black-glass blob—reflective in the day, glowing at night—that filled the whole lot, following the curves of medieval streets. Three open-plan floors were served by a central bank of escalators running in a continuous, waterfall-like line, resembling those which would soon be on the side of the Pompidou. There’s some of this spirit in the Bloomberg building in London, done forty years later: deep floor plans shaped by centuries-old street patterns; daylight from above. In Ipswich, Foster’s clients were persuaded to include a roof garden and, on the ground floor, a staff swimming pool.
Today, about a hundred twentieth-century buildings are on a British list of structures that are granted the strongest legal protections against alterations. The Willis Building is the only one designed and built in the nineteen-seventies. Because of the listing, almost nothing about the building can be changed. On a recent visit, I was shown around by employees who seemed sincerely attached to it; one of them threw himself, loudly, at the glass wall, to demonstrate its strength. Michael Hopkins, who worked with Foster in the seventies and went on to have a high-profile career of his own, can take some of the design credit. All the same, the building seems to introduce us to the young Foster, making a Midwestern road trip in Carl Abbott’s Beetle or sitting at the bar of the Four Seasons: there’s a feeling of American spaciousness and adventure acting on a meticulous, engineering-oriented, slightly aggrieved sensibility. As one of my guides acknowledged, Ipswich is not currently a prospering place. (I met children outside getting themselves into a screeching, happy panic by poking at a half-dead rat with a stick.) But the building was cheering and oddly undated, even though it is locked, by law, into its era. The corridors are still yellow, the carpets lime green. When the pool was shut down, in 1991, it would have been illegal to hammer it out. So it was emptied, boarded over, and carpeted. At dusk, on my visit, workers in the pension-administration department were at their desks on top of it, beside original sans-serif signs reading “Deep End.”
Shuttleworth, who didn’t work on Beanhill but was very aware of it at the time, understands Foster’s reticence, and is sympathetic. “There are some projects you don’t talk about,” he said. “We’ve all got a few of those. If somebody asks you, then: Yes, we did them. But you’d qualify how much you did and what actually happened.”
The houses, built on uninsulated concrete slabs, had flat roofs, single-glazed windows, and thin walls clad in aluminum, ribbed horizontally. That cladding resembles the original exterior panels (since replaced) on what would be Foster’s great critical success of the late seventies: the Sainsbury Centre, an extraordinary hangar-like gallery and art-history-faculty space at the University of East Anglia. As Foster put it to me, the Sainsbury’s panels took some inspiration from Citroëns of the period—which included the Méhari, a Jeep-like car with a very modest engine. Among his dozens of cars—a 1943 Chrysler Airflow, a 1961 Jaguar E-Type—Foster has a white Méhari that he sometimes drives around Martha’s Vineyard, confident that it won’t break the speed limit.
To Beanhill’s tenants, the readier point of visual reference was corrugated iron. “They were basically sheds,” Shuttleworth said. “I think the optimism there was about the climate.” The houses were prone to leaking, and to condensation: you’d wake up to wet carpets. He added that his own house—in the striking form of two nested crescents—also has flat roofs. “Luckily, I’m the client as well as the architect. So, when it leaks, I don’t go and sue anybody.” Because of the appearance and imperfections of the Beanhill homes, a local myth arose that they were built as temporary housing for construction workers.
Milton Keynes sued Foster Associates and its contractors. In 1984, a settlement helped pay for repairs that included replacing flat roofs with pitched ones. (One architectural journalist has called this an indignity.) Guy Ortolano, a historian at N.Y.U. who has written about Beanhill, says there is little acknowledgment today in Milton Keynes of the city’s link to the country’s most famous architect. Some Beanhill homes are now owned by their occupants, and one residence came onto the market last summer for less than a hundred and fifty thousand pounds, which made it about the cheapest house available, mobile homes excluded, anywhere near London.
One could think of Beanhill as a story of repair, adaptation, and survival. The neighborhood isn’t prosperous, but it has endured. One could imagine Foster referring to this commission—including its disappointments—in the talks he sometimes gives about cities and sustainability. He doesn’t. Foster is friendly with the Chilean architect Alejandro Aravena, who in 2016 won the Pritzker, in part for his company’s “half of a good house” initiatives, which make the best of meagre social-housing budgets by creating homes that lend themselves to D.I.Y. expansions. In a recent conversation, Aravena spoke warmly of Foster, but noted that great architects can find it hard to embrace the provisional, or “good enough.” He added, “You have to be O.K. to start a process, not deliver a product. You have to be able to lose control.”
None of that sounds like Lord Foster, basil-leaf counter. One of the small stresses of spending time with Foster is knowing that, wherever you decide to set down your bag, you’ll have made a mistake. It will be moved; someone will restore the order that existed before there was a bag on that chair. When I asked about Beanhill, Foster looked a little pained. He was unsure, he said, why the project hadn’t turned out better. “I never really got to the bottom of it.” To his credit, he didn’t refer to colleagues who’d led the design. He did note that the client’s architectural chief had been “very much in control.”
In a conversation last summer, Elena Foster talked of her husband’s extreme agitation on the night before the stunning Millau Viaduct, in central southern France, was first opened to traffic, in 2004. Designed by Foster + Partners and Michel Virlogeux, a veteran bridge specialist, the viaduct swoops over a gorge on needlelike pylons, the tallest of which is taller than any building in the country. The couple was staying in a nearby village. Elena recalled that Norman couldn’t sleep; he was tortured by his decision to make the pylons white. “He was saying, ‘White! Why? Why? Why? The sky is blue! It will not disappear into the landscape like I want! Black would be better! Brown!’ ” (He was reassured when he saw the bridge again the next day.)
Foster, for whom “pristine” is an adjective of high praise, told me that he’s rarely quite at ease in a Foster + Partners building. All he can see are things that could have been better. (I was unsurprised to hear from more than one source that Foster is a nightmarish collaborator on his own residences. David Galbraith, a Foster architect between 1989 and 1991, who later became a tech entrepreneur, recently recalled how proud he was, as a new hire, to be asked to help on the boss’s Battersea apartment. A colleague reacted to Galbraith’s happy news by drawing a finger across his throat.) Foster told me that one exception to his slight discomfort with his firm’s finished work is the Great Court at the British Museum, whose steel-and-glass canopy casts delicate patterned shadows on the stone below. His colleague Armstrong Yakubu recalled another example. He described walking with Foster through a branch of Asprey, the luxury-goods brand, which opened in Trump Tower in 2003. Foster was delighted with it all, and for a moment was puzzled by his own delight.
“What is exactly different about this?” he asked Yakubu. “Well, the difference is that everything you’re looking at has been handmade,” Yakubu replied.
Against expectation, Foster never moved to Hong Kong. Instead, he commuted from London, at a time before direct flights, and he took up endurance exercise to make the regime survivable. (Architectural careers often don’t fully blossom until late middle age, so it’s helpful to stay alive. The world’s best-known living architects—Piano, Koolhaas, Frank Gehry, Tadao Ando—are significantly older than the best-known novelists.) Foster, from London, could seek out new work. “I was aware of so many instances where architects had won major competitions, and been completely absorbed by that project, and then afterward there was a crisis,” Foster told me. “And they had to virtually start from scratch back at home base.” Rogers, post-Pompidou, had struggled. Before the bank was finished, Foster Associates began work on its first airport terminal, at Stansted, north of London. Not long afterward, the firm started on a new airport in Hong Kong. David Galbraith, who arrived in this era, remembers an air of high glamour: Foster was driving a Porsche, and “everyone had fantastic bicycles.”
In 1989, Wendy Foster died, of cancer. She and Norman had bought land together in Battersea for a new office building. That’s where the firm moved the next year. The recession of the early nineties briefly shrank the business. Foster, fascinated by machines—and perhaps most appreciative of other people when they’re seen from an L. S. Lowry-like distance—had taken to flying gliders, and then planes. Graham Phillips, who by the early nineties had become the firm’s managing director, told me that part of his challenge in keeping the company in good shape was the cost of the founder’s helicopter and jet. “We were a practice of a hundred people!” he noted. (Foster, responding to this, talked about the opportunities created by being able to shuttle clients and colleagues around at speed.)
The company prospered, in part, by accepting commissions for spec office space—for buildings that would house unidentified future occupants, in deals put together by real-estate developers. Later, the Gherkin was this kind of commission; so was Foster’s thousand-foot-tall contribution to Hudson Yards. But, forty years ago, such work was widely judged to be beneath the dignity of the élite firms that design opera houses and win prizes. As Shuttleworth explained, it was perceived to be “better to be working with an end user than with a developer who wants a vanilla building they can let to anybody.” Shuttleworth takes a little credit for encouraging Foster to embrace this kind of commission; the firm began with a London office building for Stuart Lipton, which was finished in the early nineties. In the subsequent decade, Shuttleworth recalled, “we earned a hundred million pounds in the London property market.”
An architect’s fees are usually expressed as a percentage of a building’s total budget. Foster has never had the lowest fees. And his budgets, then as now, tended to reflect more exotic materials and more exacting processes. As Lipton explained to me, sometimes you’re in the market for the simplest, quickest option. But he discovered a taste for being nudged into experimentation by stars such as Foster. “And, look, an architect is broadly getting a five-to-six-per-cent fee,” he said. “It’s the other ninety-five per cent that you’re worried about. Are you going to get good value? Will it be a long-term investment? Will it finish on time? Will the detailing be good?” Moreover, Lipton said, when you hire a firm like Foster + Partners, you’re simplifying your dealings with city planners. You’re buying deference, or at least open-mindedness. Michael Jones, a senior Foster architect, who had a central role in the design of the British Museum’s Great Court, and Bloomberg, and a 2009 expansion of Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, recently told me about a fairly radical renovation he’d done on the interior of an Edwardian house that he owns in an English seaside town. An application to local authorities didn’t mention where he worked. But an official, struck by the drawings that Jones had submitted, looked him up. At the next meeting: “If you can be trusted with the British Museum, I think we can trust you with this.”
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 hi