Building a legacy

Just as his glittering steel and glass constructions dominate the skylines of many major cities, so Lord Norman Foster’s reputation towers over those of his contemporaries. The founder and chairman of Foster+Partners, a practice employing over 1,000 people across the globe, Foster is the creative force behind the Beijing airport, the Hearst Building in New York, the Reichstag in Berlin and 30 St Mary Axe, aka the Gherkin, in London. 

 

Foster’s bold and innovative designs have helped define contemporary architecture. So it is unsurprising that when Deyan Sudjic, director of the Design Museum, was approached to write Foster’s authorised biography he was keen to accept. 

 

“He has had the most memorable career of any living British architect, and one that is known to the public,” says Sudjic, author of Norman Foster: A life in architecture. “It was an opportunity to write about architecture for a wider audience, to explain what it’s really like to build something.”

 

The task of writing Foster’s biography could have been daunting - both for Sudjic, wanting to create an accurate portrait of the man, and for Foster who, despite his high public profile, has retained a very private life. But their long acquaintance (they met many years ago, when Sudjic was an architecture critic), gave Sudjic a privileged insight into Foster’s life.

 

“One of the things that I found useful was having seen his buildings at various stages of development - huge airports when they were just holes in the ground,” Sudjic says, thoughtfully. “There was an amount of academic research, talking to people he’d worked with in the beginning and so on, but it was more of a spectator view.”

 

Their close relationship also enabled Foster to open up to his biographer, revealing aspects of his personal life that had previously been hidden. “He said that he had survived cancer and a heart attack - I had no idea,” says Sudjic. “But he was happy to talk about it.” 

 

Did Foster find it strange to talk about himself, knowing that this information was to be made public for the first time? “Yes - initially,” says Foster. “But after a while it became more like a conversation than an interview.”

 

At least Foster was safe in the knowledge that his personal life would not be the focus of the book. Sudjic took Mark Girouard’s biography of architect James Stirling as “a model of what I didn’t want to do: a warts and all account of a private life”. (The London Review of Books described Girouard’s book as containing “paragraphs that read like an architectural Hello!”) “This is not that sort of a book,” Sudjic says, firmly. “It tells the story of a life through architecture.”

Sudjic’s conceptual approach is based on his belief that, “if you look at the place someone inhabits and the things they like, you can make a lot of deductions about them.” This is perhaps especially true of architects, who very deliberately shape their environment. But Sudjic also wanted to explore the idea that aspects of the architect’s personal life can throw new light on his work. 

 

“Life experiences do shape your work, and architecture shapes the way you want to live,” Sudjic reflects. “I do think it’s relevant that Norman grew up in a house with not many books in the shadow of a railway track. Design is about how to live in a better way, and that comes through in his work.”

 

Sudjic attributes Foster’s worldwide success to his ability to “leap from audience to audience”. The awards won by Foster+Partners for structures as different as the Milllau Viaduct in France, to the Masdar city in Abu Dhabi, are testament to his versatility. “Foster does not really do style, what drives him is clarity, optimism and detail,” says Sudjic. 

 

Considering Foster’s reputation for clarity and detail, his gleaming endorsement of the book is a definite compliment to his biographer. “I think Deyan Sudjic did an excellent job,” says Foster, decisively. “Significantly, the people whose opinions I respect found it very readable and difficult to put down, because it gave insights into the processes of designing and making buildings.”

 

Has writing the biography changed their relationship? “Writing an authorised biography certainly suggests a certain degree of intimacy in a way that working as a critic does not,” says Sudjic. “So it has been a process that has certainly changed me, though not, I suspect, my subject.”

 

Foster’s buildings stand as the greatest monuments to his career, but Sudjic’s biography, released to coincide with the architect’s 75th birthday, will also shape his legacy. Has Foster any thoughts as to what that legacy will be? “No,” he says. “I leave that to others.”