Today, what’s fast becoming one of the architectural world’s most high-profile double acts will take to the world’s largest stage for the opening of Expo 2015 in Milan.
For the second time in five years, the UAE will present an image of itself to the world using a national pavilion designed by Foster + Partners, the British architectural firm responsible for the UAE pavilion at the Shanghai Expo in 2010.
Like its counterpart in Shanghai, the Milan pavilion makes reference to the UAE’s landscape, simultaneously looking backwards and forwards to create an image of the country that combines the natural with the man-made and tradition with the technological cutting edge.
The result is a Janus-faced effect that defines not just the pavilion but its designer as well, the 79-year-old English architect Norman Foster, a man described variously as the “Mozart of modernism”, the “Valentino of his profession” and the “high-priest of high-tech”.
Foster is often described in contradictory and contrasting terms. For some, the Pritzker Architecture Prize winner is an innovator and an architectural radical, a man who alongside his lifelong friend and one-time collaborator Sir Richard Rogers helped to define modern architecture as the public understands it today.
For others, Foster is a safe pair of hands, renowned for delivering impressive but impersonal projects on budget and on time, but whose buildings, for all of their technological bells and whistles, deliver only a semblance of change.
More often, the architect is described as a ruthless and fiercely driven control-freak, an impression that isn’t undermined by his Bond-villain looks, his love of yachts and airplanes, and his penchant for flying his own gliders, helicopters and jets.
Foster is on record as saying that he does not recognise "the severe and cold man described in interviews", and has suggested that his "aloofness" is a symptom of a certain awkwardness – shyness not disdain. "It's something I've had to overcome," he told The Financial Times's Emma Jacobs in 2011.
Foster’s sense of being a perennial outsider doesn’t seem to have harmed his career. A multimillionaire, he’s the head of the United Kingdom’s largest architectural practice, with offices in 14 countries and projects all over the world.
An only child, Norman Robert Foster was born in Reddish, near Stockport, on June 1, 1935, but his father moved the family to Levenshulme, a tough, working-class neighbourhood nearer Manchester, when Foster was young. Interested in books and something of a dreamer, Foster was noticeably different from his peers and had to cope with bullying from an early age.
"I always felt different and retired into the world of books, and, of course like many boys, was fascinated by aircraft, locomotives and machinery. Manchester was one of the workshops of the world at the time, so it would have been hard not to be," he told The Guardian newspaper in 1999.
Leaving school at 16, Foster worked as a clerk at Manchester Town Hall, then served in the Royal Air Force, before enrolling to study architecture at the University of Manchester in 1956.
Winning a postgraduate scholarship to study at Yale in 1961 proved possibly the most important award that Foster has ever received. Not only did he meet Richard Rogers in the United States, but he also discovered the lightweight structures of the great American inventor Buckminster Fuller, with whom he would collaborate in later years.
Back in the UK, Foster and Rogers established their first studio in 1963. Called Team 4, it included their respective wives, Su Brumwell and Wendy Cheesman, and together they designed the Reliance Controls Factory in Swindon, the first “high-tech” building in the UK.
In 1967, Foster and Cheesman set out on their own, establishing the business that eventually became Foster + Partners in 1992.
The 1974 Willis, Faber & Dumas headquarters in Ipswich made the architect’s name in the UK, but it was the commission to design a new Hong Kong headquarters for HSBC that saved them from bankruptcy and provided Foster with his international calling card. When it was completed in 1985, it was then the most expensive building yet made, at a cost of £5 billion.
From that point on, Foster + Partners never looked back, as a string of high-profile commissions followed, including the Commerzbank Tower in Frankfurt, the Beijing Capital International Airport and the Hearst Tower in New York.
Some critics have dismissed Foster + Partners as designers in pursuit of superlatives – to be biggest, highest, tallest or longest – but there are certain things most commentators agree on.
"Norman Foster is the single most successful British architect in history, whether success is measured by the size of his office, fame, honours, global reach or number of projects," wrote the critic Rowan Moore in a 2002 profile for Prospect magazine. "And this is to say nothing of the icons and airports he has bestowed on Hong Kong, Berlin, Barcelona, Nîmes, Frankfurt, Tokyo, Singapore, Glasgow, Cambridge and Omaha, Nebraska. Few, if any, living Britons have the international stature in their fields that Foster has in his."
Foster now occupies a position reserved for a small group of “starchitects”, thanks to a series of projects that combine symbolism with a heroic elegance.
The German Reichstag in Berlin is one such project, as is the 270-metre-high, cloud-capped Millau Viaduct in the south of France.
In London alone, Foster + Partners are responsible for projects that include the current Wembley Stadium, the British Museum’s Great Court, the pedestrianised plaza on the north side of Trafalgar Square, the instantly recognisable Gherkin and the pedestrian Millennium Bridge across the Thames.
But when it comes to national identity and state, there’s no stronger special relationship than the one he has forged with the UAE and its rulers. As well as the UAE’s recent Expo pavilions, Foster + Partners were also responsible for the original master plan of Masdar and the design for the Masdar Institute. Foster is also responsible for the Index Tower, his only project in Dubai, and Abu Dhabi’s tallest tower, the 92-storey, 382-metre-high Burj Mohammed bin Rashid, which rises from the Foster-designed World Trade Center complex, also developed by Aldar, that stands on the site of Abu Dhabi’s original souq.
The most prestigious of Foster’s UAE commissions, however, has to be the Zayed National Museum, which is intended to sit alongside Abu Dhabi’s Louvre and Guggenheim as the centrepiece of the Saadiyat Island Cultural District. Part-monument, part-memorial, the museum has been designed to evoke the UAE’s natural landscapes and the feathers of a falcon’s wing, promising to be Foster’s most important attempt to render Emirati identity in concrete, glass and steel.
What’s the secret to Foster’s phenomenal success? One possibility was revealed in 2012 in a series of short films that provided behind-the-scenes insight into how starchitects win work. The films recorded the pitches made by four of the world’s most famous architects as they presented designs for 425 Park Avenue, a commercial tower destined for the heart of Manhattan.
One by one, Rem Koolhaas, Zaha Hadid, Richard Rogers and Foster presented to the L&L Holding Company; one by one, the first three personalities on that list failed to connect.
Enter Foster, calm and dressed for business, describing his project down to the last-minute detail, as if he had been personally responsible for every stage of its design.
Calm, reassuring and very human, Foster speaks in an eloquent manner that immediately puts his audience at ease. “Trust me,” his manner seems to say. “I know what I’m doing. Just think about all of those other remarkable statements I’ve built.”
Needless to say, it was the pitch by one of the world’s great communicators, Baron Foster of Thames Bank, that ultimately won the day.
nleech@thenational.ae
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