Jonathan Morrison
Lord Foster: The down-to-earth thinker with designs on Mars
At 80, the architect Norman Foster has plans for Mars bases and drone ports but his biggest dream is to create housing for the world’s poor
“We were considered absolute lunatics for coming here,” Norman Foster explains, once we’re seated in his office, just south of the Thames by Battersea Park. “Why would you go to Battersea? In the 1980s this site was a no-go area. You wouldn’t walk here. Why would you do it? You must be mad! And why would you combine residential and office space in one building? It’s still quite radical.”
At the age of 80, Lord Foster of Thames Bank’s ideas still sound pretty radical. The architect outlines plans in passing to cover every railway line into London with a cycle track. Coming from anyone else, it would sound ridiculous. The list of his projects reads like a Philip K Dick novel: Mars bases, drone ports, artificial islands, the “flying saucer” HQ for Apple — a glass circle a mile in circumference.
The office itself, quiet as a library, is like a gallery of his greatest hits. There’s a model of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank headquarters in Hong Kong, started in 1979, that helped propel him into the stratosphere of the profession. At the time, it was the most expensive building in the world, a vertical city of finance. In the far corner is a large model of 30 St Mary Axe — the Gherkin. It’s probably his most famous building in Britain and was credited with making tall buildings popular again. He is partly responsible for the rash of oddly monikered skyscrapers popping up around London — the Cheesegrater, the Can of Ham and the Scalpel.
And it’s responsibility that Lord Foster — wearing his trademark black poloneck — wants to talk about, beginning with the responsibility of our politicians. He’s just delivered a speech to the London School of Economics in which he contrasts the vision of people like Joseph Bazalgette — the man who built London’s sewerage system, cleaned the Thames and is one of Foster’s great heroes — with the ongoing struggles to build a new runway somewhere, anywhere.
“Bazalgette had this extraordinary holistic vision: during the Great Stink, when the Thames was an open sewer, he took the opportunity not just to solve the problem of sanitation, but to express civic pride [by building the embankments]. We still trade on this today. It’s important to not just solve the problem in front of you.
“When we do an airport like Beijing [Foster designed its Terminal 3], it’s satisfying a physical need for transportation but also making a statement: it signals the aspirations of a nation and how it gets things done. It’s something we seem to take for granted.”
Has he a sneaking regard for the speed with which less democratic nations get things done? “I’m not saying we should be like China. It’s absolutely appropriate that there should be public debate and inquiries. But look at Heathrow Terminal 5 — it took 20 years to build one terminal with no infrastructure. It’s about decision- making. It’s always: shall we, shan’t we? The infrastructure opportunities are not seen as opportunities – they’re seen as ‘We’ve got to make do and mend.’ ”
He admits that the idea of a new airport in the Thames estuary, for which he submitted proposals — dubbed “Boris Island” after the Mayor of London lent his support — has become a bit of a hobbyhorse. If Hong Kong can build a new airport on reclaimed land in six years, he says, there’s no reason why London can’t, only that “it’s considered too difficult”. He scoffs at a figure of £40 billion but declines to give a precise alternative.
“We proposed this based on our experience. It would be one component of a wider scheme: linked to new flood defences, tidal power and enabling the eastwards expansion of London. You can have a new runway or you can have an airport that will deliver 150 million people plus. When you’ve built another runway you’re still standing still. You haven’t got a hub. Heathrow is not a 24-hour airport. It starts at 6am and finishes at 10 or 11pm. Building in the Thames would be less ambitious than Hong Kong or Beijing. It’s a failure of political leadership. If you have projects like that and it’s seen that it has the backing of government then the funds will flow. It could be financed from private investors.
“London’s expansion has been massive — in the Seventies it was assumed it would shrink, of course — so you secure the east and create opportunity in the west. To improve the life of a city, you have to make some bold decisions.”
Where does the buck stop? “It’s totally political,” he says.
He claims that architects have little power to influence things, despite being made a member of the House of Lords in 1999. A life peer, he retains his title but resigned in 2010, on the basis that he is now resident in Switzerland — he lives in an 18th-century chateau surrounded by vineyards, between Lausanne and Geneva, with his third wife Elena Ochoa (he has five children) — and is no longer allowed to vote here. His last speech was in 2003, although he had battled and beaten bowel cancer a few years before. Was his time in the Lords a missed opportunity? “As a practice we have great opportunities, and as an architect you get a tremendous charge out of responding to challenges. The power of the argument [presented as a design] is greater than anything I could say in forums [like the House of Lords],” he says, carefully.
And yet there is much he wants to change. There are, he says, “huge opportunities to improve the quality of urban living”. Again, he looks to the past for inspiration, that Victorian blend of private commerce and public spirit. He refers frequently to his first job as a clerk in Manchester Town Hall and the impression of civic pride the building itself, by Alfred Waterhouse, made on him. Asked how to solve the housing crisis, he says: “I cannot see why local authorities cannot sell their land with sufficient development rights and a stringent set of rules that allow for lower income families and individuals to have good quality housing. There’s no reason [why] building for them cannot co-exist with a market-driven economy.”
Yet this is a global practice and his concerns are less parochial: his employees represent an international elite, with projects in Mexico City, Buenos Aires, the Far East and Africa. Sometimes it must mean working for some pretty distasteful regimes. Has he ever refused a project on moral grounds?
“Yes. I turned down a project for the British Film Institute a long time ago. It was to design a building for the storage of vintage film stock in the middle of a residential area. Vintage film stock is very flammable — it can spontaneously combust. I thought it was the equivalent of placing a bomb.”
And yet his practice has worked in a number of countries in the Middle East that are accused of exploiting foreign workers, among other human rights abuses. Does this not worry him?
“It’s a difficult one. As an architect you’re trained to embrace opportunities and turn them to civic and social advantage. If you look at the way that the regimes that we would never question behave, it’s a very difficult sliding scale. Pillars of democratic tradition are not free of criticism: if you institutionalise torture, if you have death by injection that takes an hour, if you are party to ‘rendition’, then you are not spotless.
“Before you accept a project you debate, and in the end you have to take a balance of the benefits that will follow. The benefits may create something better. The migrant worker question is a very difficult one. Obviously, contracts we’re party to insist certain standards are met. But we’re on site looking to see whether it’s being built in accordance with our design. If we see unsafe conditions, then we’ll report it and try to do something about it. It’s not our responsibility but that doesn’t mean to say we don’t care passionately about it.”
On a personal level, he says, “Part of me is thinking: why aren’t we designing settlements for the workforce? Why aren’t we suggesting that we have responsibility to design these? That’s a recent thought on my part . . . I’m enormously tempted to do that and I think I will.”
It seems strange to be having an epiphany at this late stage. He is one of only two architects on the Sunday Times rich list, with an estimated personal fortune of £160 million. Foster & Partners are the largest firm of architects in the UK, the 16th largest in the world. If he, or they, can’t make a difference, then who can?
The projects that most seem to excite him at present are a scheme for building a network of drone ports across Africa to transport vital supplies such as medicines, and a base for exploring Mars for Nasa, using robots and 3D printers to build structures out of regolith, the mixture of dust and rock on the surface. One will almost certainly happen, the other may not.
“The drone port project owes heavily to our Mars project as in both cases you can’t transport the material to build with — you have to work with what is there. In Rwanda [the launch site for the drone project] you have a shortage of steel and roads. So-called all-season roads turn into quagmires. By 2050, there will be 2.5 billion people in Africa, or one in four of the population of the planet. How is the infrastructure ever going to catch up?”
As one of his colleagues, Narinder Sagoo, later puts it: “People in Africa will have robots in their kitchens before they have running water.”
So far, so sci-fi. I ask what he would most like to build, given a free hand, expecting an underwater city or a space station. “It would be great to tackle the needs of housing, the needs that are not considered the responsibility of the profession or of almost any profession.
“Where, in an informal settlement, the majority can’t throw a switch and have power, run a tap and have water, have light — I’d like to make a contribution, however small. It’s why I admire the unsung architects in places like Colombia and India. I’d like to do something that would make a big difference but is not a great architectural statement. It might be little, but the effect would be transformative.”
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