Words matter. These are the best Norman Foster Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
You cannot separate the buildings out from the infrastructure of cites and the mobility of transit.
There’s a snobbery at work in architecture. The subject is too often treated as a fine art, delicately wrapped in mumbo-jumbo. In reality, it’s an all-embracing discipline taking in science, art, maths, engineering, climate, nature, politics, economics.
I think you never stop learning.
I’m not a creature of habit. I like to find things from unexpected sources.
As an architect, you design for the present, with an awareness of the past, for a future which is essentially unknown.
You can find, occasionally, some absolutely fantastic things in hunting shops. I’ve got one jacket that I just happened across which is a kind of unwashed leather – completely anonymous but absolutely special.
Control is the wrong word. The practice is very much about sharing, and, in any creative practice, some individuals, whether partners or directors, are much closer to certain projects than I could ever be.
There are those airports which make you feel better, and there are those airports that, when you go there, your heart sinks: you can’t wait to get out of there. They both function as airports, but it’s the things that you can’t measure that make them different.
I describe the design process as like the tip of the iceberg. What you don’t see is the long haul: all the endless auditing and things like that.
I love flying; I love aircraft, and you could say I’ve had a love affair with flight since I was a child. I travel a huge amount. I use airports, and as a pilot, I’ve flown in and out of airports thousands of times, so really, I have a fairly broad perspective.
The Italians have long known what makes a livable town or city.
Joseph Bazalgette created a sewer system which he originally sized for London’s needs of the time – he then doubled it to anticipate the future beyond. These are the qualities that I admire.
The only honourable work my parents knew was blue-collar. But while my father Robert ran a pawnbroker’s shop, and my mother was a waitress, I moved into a middle-class world with a level of security they never knew.
When the Great Fire of London destroyed most of the medieval city in 1666, Christopher Wren was invited to design a new one. Within days, he had drawn up an elegant grid of broad boulevards leading to majestic squares, but it came to nothing – the existing landowners wanted things as they had been.
Anything that reduces fuel consumption and cuts down on greenhouse gasses is good news.
We now think it hilarious that medieval streets were used as open sewers. Equally, our descendants will say: ‘You won’t believe this, but people were once allowed to hurl a couple of tons of dangerous metal around smashing into each other.’
I think cars encapsulate the history of innovation and style – it’s the other side of the coin of the car being public enemy No.1.
I tend to move between turtlenecks and shirts and ties. I don’t really have a uniform in the sense that some people might.
I hope that any expansion of London will learn from the planning examples of some of its most desirable areas such as Chelsea, Notting Hill, Belgravia and Mayfair. All are characterised by high density and a generosity of green spaces.
Surveys often show people would prefer a detached house with a lawn and driveway to an apartment. I understand this. It’s not my place to presume to tell people where they can live. But perhaps that dream will simply not be possible in the future.
I travel continuously, and I see many cities, but there is nowhere like London.
The most amazing lesson in aerodynamics I ever had was the day I climbed a thermal in a glider at the same time as an eagle. I witnessed, close up, effortlessness and lightness combined with strength, precision and determination.
Since Stonehenge, architects have always been at the cutting edge of technology. And you can’t separate technology from the humanistic and spiritual content of a building.
Google has already tested robot cars in San Francisco. If they can navigate San Francisco, they can probably manage just about anywhere.
I would never wear anything with a logo. That I really find difficult. It’s a frustration that I’ll find a nice shirt or something and it’s got 50 prints of the logo on it – why do they do this?
