Norman Foster
27 Projects
About Norman Foster
Norman Foster, Baron Foster of Thames Bank (Manchester, June 1, 1935) is a British architect. He studied architecture at the University of Manchester and later received a scholarship to continue his studies at Yale University. He is one of the most renowned and internationally recognized contemporary architects.
The Reichstag in Berlin after its restoration by Norman Foster in 1999. Commerzbank Tower. Upon returning to England, Foster worked for a time with the architect Richard Buckminster Fuller and, in 1965, founded the architectural firm Team 4 with his first wife Wendy, Richard Rogers, and Rogers’s wife, Sue. Three years later, the firm dissolved, and Norman founded Foster Associates with Wendy.
Foster’s early projects are characterized by a very pronounced “high-tech” style, also influenced by the ideas of his partner Rogers. Later, the lines of his buildings became softer, and much of that technical character, taken to an extreme, disappeared. In any case, the projects by Foster and his partners bear a marked industrial stamp, in the sense that they use building elements that are repeated many times and are therefore manufactured in places far from the construction site. Components are frequently designed specifically for a building, thereby reflecting a style of fine craftsmanship.
Foster was knighted in 1990 and was awarded the Order of Merit in 1997. In 1999, Queen Elizabeth II granted him the life peerage title of Baron Foster of Thames Bank.
He has also received several major architecture awards, such as the Gold Medal of the American Institute of Architects and, in 1999, the prestigious Pritzker Prize.
As for his private life, in 1996 he married Elena Ochoa, who is 23 years younger than him, a Spanish psychologist famous for presenting a television program about sex. Foster had been widowed in 1989 and had four children, two of them adopted.
In 2007, Norman Foster designed his first winery, Portia, for the Spanish wine group Faustino in the town of Gumiel de Izán, in the province of Burgos.
Currently, Foster’s firm and its associates have offices in London, Berlin, and Singapore, with a staff of 500 people.
