Sir Norman Foster Biography
On no account can the modern architecture be extensively analyzed without mentioning Sir Norman Foster, a prolific and successful British architect. Having built various world’s famous structures, Sir Foster has won about 150 awards throughout his 35-year-old career from institutions such as the American Institute of Architects, RIBA, and the Pritzker Prize (Beard). Foster’s use of the High Tech style had a powerful impact in the field of architecture and has influenced many architects who came after him.
Sir Norman Foster was born on June 1, 1935, in Manchester, England. He is widely known for his sleek, contemporary designs of glass and steel with advancements in internal space management and contouring. Throughout his career, Foster is known for the development of sophisticated, innovative structural models such as London’s City Hall, Swiss Re Tower, New York’s Hearst Tower, and Berlin’s Reichstag.
Foster exhibited a keen interest in architecture from an early age. However, the socio-economic status of his family did not guarantee that he would pursue a career in architecture. Foster left school when he was 16 years and became a clerk at the town hall. He later ventured into engineering, where he worked in the Royal Air Force for two years. Foster then went to the University of Manchester, where he won a series of awards for his drawings. His impressive skills and passion for sketching later earned him a scholarship to the School of Architecture at Yale University, where he earned his masters in 1962. While at Yale, Foster met with an architectural group, and they formed an organization known as Team 4. However, he broke off from the team and formed his own company, Foster Associates, currently known as Foster + Partners (Beard).
Foster got his big break in the early 1970s following his design of the Willis Faber & Dumas headquarters in Ipswich. During the late 70s and mid-80s, Team 4 worked on the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation Headquarters. In the 90s, Foster worked on the renovation of Reichstag while in the early 2000s, he contributed to the design of the Hearst Tower. Currently, Foster + Partners uses computer systems to create efficient buildings. Foster’s high-tech vision style has evolved into more sharp-edged modernity.
One of the most recognized designs created by Foster is London’s Swiss Re Tower, also known as 30 St Mary Axe. For this structure, Foster used computer-aided design and environmental and energy designs, which allows the building to consume only half the power that such a construction would typically consume (Foster). The high tech style is represented in the Swiss Re Tower by its missile-shaped curved glass shape.
The London City Hall is also another famous high-tech structure designed by Foster. The building is made of a double façade glass and has a spherical shape mainly intended to increase its energy efficiency by reducing its surface area (Foster).
Foster’s adoption of High-Tech designs can be linked to the socio-economic factors of the early 1970s when a financial recession was being experienced hence, creating the need for energy-efficient buildings (Agudiez). Moreover, in 1970, stronger building materials such as steel, aluminum, and glass became more popular and cheaper as a result of modernism and industrialization. Foster’s High-Tech style represents the modernism architectural culture that upon innovative construction technologies such as glass, reinforced concrete, and steel.
Foster married his business partner, Wendy Cheeseman, in 1964. She died of cancer in 1989, leaving behind four sons. In 1991, he married Sabiha Malik but later got divorced in 1995. He married his third and current wife, Professor Elena Ochoa, in 1996. In his 60s, Foster was diagnosed with bowel cancer, which was treated. He also suffered a heart attack