Norman Foster

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Image:Foster - Willis Faber and Dumas Headquarters Ipswich.jpg Image:Reichstag mit Wiese.jpg Image:Wfm foster armadillo.jpg Image:Top of 30 St Mary Axe RJL.JPG Image:J Sainsbury HQ 1.jpg Image:Cg1 expo exterior.jpg

Norman Robert Foster, Baron Foster of Thames Bank, OM (born 1 June 1935) is a British architect and designer.

Foster was born in Manchester to a working class family. Leaving school at 16, he initially worked in Manchester's City Treasurer's office before National Service in the Royal Air Force. Once out of the Royal Air Force,he went to Manchester University's School of Architecture & City Planning (in 1961). He won a fellowship to Yale University, where he earned his Masters degree. He cofounded Team 4 with Richard Rogers, whom he met at Yale and in 1967 founded Foster Associates.He collabrated with Buckminster Fuller on several projects between 1971 and 1983; these projects were catalysts in the development of an environmentally sensitive approach to design. Today, Foster and Partners, together with its engineering collaborators, integrates complex computer systems with the most basic physical laws, such as convection, to create intelligent, efficient structures like the Swiss Re headquarters in London, whose complex facade lets in air for passive cooling and then vents it as it warms and rises.

Knighted in 1990 and appointed to the Order of Merit in 1997. In 1999 he was created a life peer, with the title of Lord Foster of Thames Bank. Foster is known by the British tabloid newspapers as "Lord Wobbly", due to structural problems with his Millennium Bridge. He has been criticised for his treatment of an arts charity, the Couper Collection, located next door to his London offices and home. See article UK Times article and UK Observer article.

Norman Foster is the second UK architect to win the Stirling Prize twice: once for the American Hangar at the Imperial War Museum Duxford in 1998 and again for 30 St Mary Axe in 2004. In consideration of his whole portfolio, Foster was awarded the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 1999.

His designs were originally a stylish, machine influenced high-tech but he has moved away from this to a more sublime, more acceptable sharp-edged modernity.

He is known to some in the UK — pejoratively — as an über- or superstar-architect, the accusation being that certain architects are given preferential status based on their fame.Foster's critics dismiss his ideas as a dystopian, rather than utopian, dream. In "Lord Foster: Stormin' Norman," Andrew Walker claims that Foster's critics "grumble about his fetishistic use of steel, aluminium and glass. His very ubiquity is seen as a threat." [1]

Recently one of Norman Foster's senior project architects, Ken Shuttleworth, who was responsible for some of Foster's best known buildings such as the GLA and "The Gherkin", left to set up the architectural practice Make [2] Some people believe that Shuttleworth was the driving force behind Foster in recent years.

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