What inspired the original starchitect, Lord Norman Foster

Sophie Bearman [00:00:00] You're listening to Life in Seven Songs, where some of the world's most fascinating people talk about the transformative moments in their lives and the songs that helped them through. From The San Francisco Standard, I'm Sophie Bearman.

Sophie Bearman [00:00:13] Joining us this week is Lord Norman Foster, the world famous "starchitect" who's been shaping skylines for six decades. You've quite possibly stood inside his buildings, or at the very least seen them in photographs. London's Wembley Stadium, New York's Hearst Tower and California's Apple Park are just some of his designs. Norman's success wasn't guaranteed — he didn't finish high school and grew up in working class Manchester in the '30s, when university wasn't an obvious choice. Yet, he's known as one of the most radical architects of the 20th century for bucking long-standing architectural traditions. Lord Norman Foster, thank you for joining us.

Norman Foster [00:01:09] Thank you.

Sophie Bearman [00:01:10] So one of the first questions I'd love to get out of the way is do you prefer Lord or Sir? And can you tell me about receiving those distinguished titles?

Norman Foster [00:01:19] They're really quite separate. I was honored with a knighthood, so I became Sir Norman. And subsequently I was elected as a baron to the House of Lords. So I am Lord Foster. Outside of the U.K., the distinctions are perhaps not so clear.

Sophie Bearman [00:01:41] But both such an honor and both of them involving the Queen, of course. Right?

Norman Foster [00:01:44] Of course. Yes.

Sophie Bearman [00:01:46] So, Lord Foster, then, you're known for reinventing and, really, vastly improving what some might, at least initially, think of as sort of mundane spots — industrial workplaces, offices, airports. Did you spend a lot of time in those sorts of spaces as a child, or did your parents?

Norman Foster [00:02:07] My childhood really was — it was a working class suburb of Manchester, and Manchester is an industrial city. And so my world was a local library, a high street, which was a shopping street, and an industrial suburb. And of course, during that time my father had been a soldier in the First World War. So he was enlisted as a security guard in an aircraft factory.

Sophie Bearman [00:02:37] Tell me about your mother a little bit, then. And what did she do?

Norman Foster [00:02:41] My mother was a housewife, and later in life, she was a waitress in a cafe not too far from home.

Sophie Bearman [00:02:48] Parents who, it sounds like, were very hardworking.

Norman Foster [00:02:51] Extraordinarily hardworking, inspirational in that sense. Very strong work ethic, very loving, very caring. I was extremely fortunate.

Sophie Bearman [00:03:00] Is there a song that you think of when you picture your mother and father?

Norman Foster [00:03:05] My first recall of music was a record, a love song that my father played on a gramophone, a wind up gramophone. It was called "I'll Walk Beside You" and it was by an Irish-American tenor John McCormack. And I can still remember the words. "I'll walk beside you through the passing years."

Norman Foster [00:03:39] I can remember smatterings of it.

Norman Foster [00:03:51] I'm almost to tears. It has an extraordinary meaning for me in terms of those who I was fortunate to benefit from their love. I owe great debts to my parents, and it's just a very moving memory.

Sophie Bearman [00:04:12] I think you and I have something in common, perhaps. When we hear music, we're very moved.

Norman Foster [00:04:16] Very moved.

Sophie Bearman [00:04:17] It's so beautiful how it can do that. So, what were your teenage years like?

Norman Foster [00:04:23] Fairly typical, really. I left school at 16.

Sophie Bearman [00:04:26] Really? Was that typical?

Norman Foster [00:04:28] Leaving school at 16 was very much about the area that I grew up in. So it was absolutely normal. University was something that I discovered myself much later.

Sophie Bearman [00:04:44] And what did you do after you left school?

Norman Foster [00:04:45] So, perhaps unlike many going into manual work, I didn't go into manual work, but I went into white collar. I went to Manchester Town Hall, where I worked as an office boy, a clerk, for two years in the City Treasurer's in the Town Hall. And, I have recall of some of the most minute details of that building, extraordinary spaces and a great statement of civic pride, very emblematic of that Victorian period. Every lunchtime I'd be walking the streets, discovering buildings. And this interest in buildings, in architecture, in urban spaces, arcades, shortcuts, it was almost like a hobby. The idea that I might actually end up in that world was totally remote at that time, but it made a deep impression. I certainly discovered that the City Treasurer's, that that was not my future.

Sophie Bearman [00:05:59] Is there a song that takes you back to that time?

Norman Foster [00:06:02] The age of 18 is marked by the premiere of a work, a symphony, which related to my discovery during that period [that] Manchester Town Hall, not too far away, a short distance, was the Free Trade Hall and the Halle Orchestra, led by Sir John Barbirolli. I remember the premiere of Ralph Vaughan Williams' Symphony No. 7, the Antarctica. That was another perhaps musical moment.

Sophie Bearman [00:06:53] I can just see you sort of leaving Manchester Town Hall, taking however many steps over to the Free Trade Hall and enjoying this incredible orchestra. I mean, take me back to hearing it for the first time. What did it fire up in you? What did it awaken?

Norman Foster [00:07:09] The music was — if I close my eyes it almost conjures up images of the icebergs, the frozen wastes. It's highly cinematic. The grandeur of mountains, the awe, the power of natural forces, of the elements.

Sophie Bearman [00:07:37] Clearly, from a young age, you were inspired by different physical spaces. How did you start to turn this hobby into a career?

Norman Foster [00:07:45] I got a job in the world of contract management, going around building sites. And, because I'd been so, as it were, at a personal interest in the world of architecture, I plucked up courage to ask a young assistant in the drawing office what he thought of Frank Lloyd Wright. And he looked at me, and I realized at that point that this young architect, he didn't know who Frank Lloyd Wright was.

Sophie Bearman [00:08:18] So I'm guessing this made you think maybe you could do what he's doing?

Norman Foster [00:08:22] Well, it was a kind of awakening moment, and that led me to start to talk to people in the drawing office and say, how do you become an architect? And the response was, well, you present a portfolio. So I put a portfolio together by using gouache, charcoal to create images of industrial Manchester, painting the view from outside my bedroom window, and decided that in the coming months I would seek a place in a school of architecture. But first I felt I should tell the boss that I was working for and he said, but to do that, you need a portfolio. And I said, well, I have a portfolio. So he said, I think you should bring it to show me tomorrow. So the next day I knocked on his door. I showed him the portfolio, and immediately I was elevated to the drawing office.

Sophie Bearman [00:09:24] But even so, you still wanted that architecture degree.

Norman Foster [00:09:27] So, you know, everybody said, quite rightly, that it would be a waste of time because I didn't have the qualifications for university, having left school at 16. But I was interviewed by the professor, Professor Cordingley. And, at the end of the interview, he said something along the lines, 'Well, obviously we can't give you a degree, but what we could do is you could do the degree course like everybody else and at the end of it, we'll give you a piece of paper which says diploma instead of degree.' And that was great. The bad news was, when I went to get a grant from the education authorities, they made the point that I wasn't studying for a degree and therefore I couldn't get a grant. So I did many things on the side.

Sophie Bearman [00:10:21] Odd jobs, you mean?

Norman Foster [00:10:22] Exactly, yes. I worked in a bakery. I worked in a garage. I worked in a furniture shop. I worked in a cold store for Wall's ice cream. You'd empty a huge trailer of metal boxes full of ice cream bars, and you'd push them into a cold store through a hatch. It was the fastest way of earning a lot of money in a short time.

Sophie Bearman [00:10:50] Did these odd jobs, these experiences, inform your drive to improve the workplace?

Norman Foster [00:10:57] I never made that connection, but, of course, many of the influences are subliminal. Certainly, the industrial workplace was pretty horrific, and so you didn't have to do much to improve it. But I had the opportunity as an architect working with the dockers in docklands in London Docks to do, at that time, the absolute unthinkable, which was to put the dockers together with management in the same building. And by the locals, I was given every reason why that would not work. The dockers were dirty. They'd swear. The secretaries would be offended. The secretaries would leave. You couldn't mix these two classes. And there was also a distrust on the part of the dockers of management, not surprisingly, given the history of industrial relations in the docks, where people would queue for a day's work.

Sophie Bearman [00:12:02] I have these sketches in front of me that I just want to bring up because I see phrases that you, that you wrote, you know, in hand, in pen, "management box and the worker shed," "the distinctions between we and they, posh and scruffy, clean and dirty, the back and the front." And it just seems so wonderfully radical for that era. Was anyone doing that before you came up with that?

Norman Foster [00:12:26] Not to my knowledge. And the only way that we realized the project was I became the representative of management, and I was the negotiator with the unions. And I became very, very good friends of the union leader. So there's an interesting inversion here. My primary role as an architect in those early years on this project, our first project,  was as a negotiator. My role as an architect followed. It was a secondary role, but then that building attracted a huge amount of attention. It was quite revolutionary in terms of its technology, its materials and obviously the social dimension.

Sophie Bearman [00:13:11] So you proved everyone wrong. The skeptics wrong, at least.

Norman Foster [00:13:15] Collectively, yes.

Sophie Bearman [00:13:19] Is there a song that brings you back to that time in your early 20s?

Norman Foster [00:13:25] Well, to anybody growing up in the industrial North, America was really where everything was happening. And West Side Story was explosive. I mean, it's difficult to capture the the contrast, the drama, the power, of seeing that, and the opening itself was very dramatic.

Norman Foster [00:13:52] It's really about the menace, the tension of what eventually becomes the rivalry between the gangs. But it's also about the mosaic, the background of New York, the grittiness, the urbanity.

Sophie Bearman [00:14:33] You mentioned America being sort of the "it" place. Tell me about the first time you went overseas or the first time you visited America. What was your impression of it?

Norman Foster [00:14:44] Towards the end of my five year course in Manchester, I applied for a Henry Fellowship, which was tenable at Yale or Harvard. And I opted for Yale because at that time Paul Rudolph had taken over as dean and his work, principally, his early works in Sarasota, were radical. They were really very fresh, different in exciting ways, use of materials, the way in which he responded to the climate, created shade. I remember the first break in the course, we went to New York. We were in — it must have been a kind of beer hall, a lot of young people were drinking beer around an open space in the center. And the music erupted and everybody got up and they started gyrating. It was "The Twist."

Sophie Bearman [00:16:06] Did you get up and dance?

Norman Foster [00:16:08] Of course. Nostalgia time. It was an extraordinarily dramatic moment, and I — which was absolutely normal in New York, in America, at that time, but it hadn't found its way across to Europe. So "The Twist," Chubby Checker, that was a defining moment musically.

Sophie Bearman [00:16:36] And we'll hear more of Lord Norman Foster's defining moments after this quick break. Stay with us.

Sophie Bearman [00:16:42] So, Lord Norman Foster, you have designed countless offices, bridges, airports, city halls, so much more in your lifetime, so many that we can't begin to discuss them all. So instead, I want to ask, what is your most memorable or impactful experience of designing a building in your life?

Norman Foster [00:17:17] With some difficulty, if I had to single out one building, it's the the Reichstag in Berlin. This was essentially a zero carbon building.

Sophie Bearman [00:17:28] Yeah. So for people who don't know, this is a project that you completed in the 1990s, not to build anew, but to restore Germany's parliament building, the Reichstag, which was important at the time for Germany's healing. A remembrance of its past, but also a celebration of its status as a united, democratic country.

Norman Foster [00:17:48] As we peeled away the layers of history from the 60s, I think we realized that it had the imprints of war, graffiti, the scars of war. And rather than try to sanitize, to homogenize, to cleanse that, we felt it was important that it was retained for future generations, that that fabric was more powerful than any reconstruction in a museum. In that sense, it was a living evidence of the history of the past, the transition from war to peace.

Sophie Bearman [00:18:26] And in particular, the building you came up with is celebrated for its massive glass dome, which visitors can stand in and watch the German parliament in action, which is radical, it's basically like being able to stand in a dome on top of the U.S. Capitol and watch Congress.

Norman Foster [00:18:43] It created a public space on the roof, which makes it the most visited parliament because you really can ascend. It's become emblematic of the city, also symbolic of a reunified Berlin. So I think it's a building on many levels. It creates a new relationship where the public are symbolically above the debating chamber of the politicians who are answerable to the public. So that, I think,  for that mixture of reasons would be one building that I would single out.

Sophie Bearman [00:19:25] Just such a forward-thinking concept. What's been the happiest moment of your life or or one of the happiest moments of your life?

Norman Foster [00:19:35] Meeting my  wife.

Sophie Bearman [00:19:37] What's her name?

Norman Foster [00:19:38] Elena. We met in 1992 at a dinner party in Toledo, and I remember perhaps, a favorite piece of music, John Lewis, later in his life, his interpretation of jazz and Bach is very special. And, and I remember sharing that in the early weeks of our coming together.

Norman Foster [00:20:06] Amazing.

Sophie Bearman [00:20:26] How do you feel when you hear that?

Norman Foster [00:20:28] Moved by its associations.

Sophie Bearman [00:20:32] Thinking about meeting your wife?

Norman Foster [00:20:34] Yes.

Sophie Bearman [00:20:34] And your love for her.

Sophie Bearman [00:20:37] What about your next song from the opera King Arthur?

Norman Foster [00:20:40] It was Elena sharing her favorite excerpt from a favorite opera, and my immediately responding to it as if I selected it myself. I mean, it was just so inevitable.

Sophie Bearman [00:21:01] This is the cold song from the Frost Scene in the Third Act.

Norman Foster [00:21:23] It's so powerful. It's so evocative. It's so strong. It's one of those spiritual pieces. I think there are powerful links between the world of architecture, between music, between film, and somehow they all are about the spirit.

Sophie Bearman [00:21:44] You've talked about architecture being both the material and the spiritual, which is exactly what you're saying. Tell me just a little bit more about that.

Norman Foster [00:21:53] I'm often asked, what is the most important? Is it the way that something looks, how it feels, or is it the function, how it works? And the assumption in that question is that how it works is about whether the water comes out of the tap, whether the light comes out of the ceiling, whether it's good heating, good cooling. But I'd argue that an essential part of the function is how it makes us feel. Does it lift our spirits? We know that a patient recovering from surgery, if that patient is in a room with a view, as opposed to facing a brick wall, that patient will leave hospital earlier. As a designer, I'd say it's not about either or. All of those things should be integrated. That's the essence of good design.

Sophie Bearman [00:22:47] I couldn't call this interview complete without asking about Apple Park, because I'm interviewing you out of San Francisco, and because it's another example of reforming and reinventing the workplace. Apple Park, for those who have never seen it, is Apple's campus in Cupertino, completed in 2018, and the main building is one giant circle or ring with this incredible interior courtyard full of trees. What's your favorite story to tell from working on that project?

Norman Foster [00:23:16] Well, it was working directly with Steve Jobs. The circle looks almost as if it was a sort of instant gesture. It was anything but. The earliest studies were all very curvilinear, and it was only at a point of crisis when I remember Steve saying, 'Every project needs a crisis. We have to take advantage of it.' And it was at that point that the project morphed into the circle. That must have been 6 or 7 months into the project. So that circular image enclosing the big green space with the landscape outside, recreating the California landscape, the fruit basket of Steve Jobs' youth growing up, that was the — that was the moment.

Sophie Bearman [00:24:23] So it wasn't this eureka moment right away?

Norman Foster [00:24:26] The eureka moment is invariably the culmination of a slog. It's almost like the finishing line at the end of a marathon. In this case, the geometry of the circle, there was a synergy between its presence in the landscape and its internal planning.

Sophie Bearman [00:24:56] People say it looks a little bit like a spaceship.

Norman Foster [00:24:59] All of the newspapers, the periodicals, the reporting, repetitiously, they all, you know, "the mothership has landed. We have liftoff." It was all the terminology of space. And for me, that's very satisfying because space and the world of flight has always been kind of part of my life, particularly flying.

Sophie Bearman [00:25:34] Because you fly your own planes.

Norman Foster [00:25:36] In the past, yes. Immersed in it, yes.

Sophie Bearman [00:25:39] So your last song, how does that fit into your story?

Norman Foster [00:25:42] If I started with a love song and that love song which my father played on a record player, and it was a kind of ode to my mother, then I'd end on an ode to Elena, a love song.

Sophie Bearman [00:26:02] "Besame Mucho," which translates to kiss me a lot.

Norman Foster [00:26:25] That's the one.

Sophie Bearman [00:26:26] And I read that it's one of the most recorded and covered songs in Spanish of all time. The version we're hearing is by Andrea Bocelli.

Norman Foster [00:26:34] An amazing interpretation.

Sophie Bearman [00:26:37] Lord Norman Foster, thank you so much for joining us.

Norman Foster [00:26:41] Pleasure. Thank you.

Sophie Bearman [00:27:07] Life in Seven Songs is a production from The San Francisco Standard. This episode was produced by me, Sophie Bearman, and our senior producer Jasmyn Morris. Our executive producers are Griffin Gaffney and Jon Steinberg. Nate Tobey is our creative consultant. This episode was mixed by Michele Lanz. Our theme music is by Kate Davis and Zubin Hensler and Clark Miller created our show art. Our music consultant is Sarah Tembeckjian. Our studio engineer is Sean McKenna at Pyramind Studios, and Serge Krebs was our on-site engineer. You can find this guest's full playlist at sf.news/spotify. Thanks for listening.