Foster In The Future

Norman Foster’s trajectory is so mighty that the biography offered by these essays hardly does it justice. After an interview on his formative years, the first article celebrates the completion of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, and subsequent texts deal with the Bilbao metro, his most popular Spanish project; his interventions in historical areas for cultural institutions like the Nîmes media library, the Royal Academy, or the British Museum; the saga of airports, the concept of which he transformed with Stansted and brought to colossal scales with Chek Lap Kok and the one raised in Beijing for the Olympics; and the work of greatest symbolic weight in his career, the Reichstag in Berlin; constructions, all, that speak the language of technique and prefigure the future while continuing to listen to lessons of the past. This visionary humanist has built his oeuvre on the margins of aesthetic fashions, and with an extraordinary continuity between early and later projects, as shown in the conversation that wraps up the book, where his penchant for flying is mixed up with musings on his life journey.