Architecture historian Owen Hopkins compares Foster to tech titans Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. "He is the one architect who occupies that position – in terms of wealth, influence, connection to politicians. He's someone who has that ability to take technology, broadly speaking, and apply it to the everyday world in really profound and popular ways.”
"In the history of architecture, Norman has produced the greatest number of architecturally important public projects," added Carl Abbott, a master’s classmate of Foster's at Yale more than six decades ago.
Foster has won every major architecture award, including the gold medals of the British, American and French architecture professions, and the Pritzker Architecture Prize.
Foster spent his childhood in a working-class neighborhood in Manchester among airplane models and books about Le Corbusier's theories of space, light, and minimalism.
At sixteen, he left school and served in the Royal Air Force (RAF). He earned money for later architecture studies at the University of Manchester by selling ice cream. After finishing school, he traveled to the USA, where he visited as many buildings of Frank Lloyd Wright as possible "on foot, by car, and by bus."
He studied architecture at Yale University in the USA and met his future business partner Richard Rogers. After returning from the USA, he established his own studio and in 1964 first caught attention with a building partially buried in the ground called Cockpit in Cornwall.
In 1990, Foster was elevated to the peerage. In 1999, he received the prestigious Pritzker Prize for architecture and ten years later the Prince of Asturias Award for the Arts (now the Princess of Asturias Award). Currently, the renowned architect mostly oversees his team.
This remarkable journey – from working-class kid with a slight lisp to trendy avant-garde architect to leader of a business empire – has cast Foster as an enduring source of fascination for the media. As long ago as 1999, the Guardian declared that "there has never been an architect like Foster".
One of Foster's key attributes on his route to success has been his skill as a communicator. This ability has enabled Foster to consistently convince the world's biggest business leaders to work with his firm, including Jobs, Michael Bloomberg and JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon.
Also, unusually for an architect, Foster is a shrewd businessman himself. From the very first days of running his own studio, Rogers says, he was "very good at investing money in things which were going to grow to support the architecture practice".
He and his long-serving Foster + Partners leaders have demonstrated an uncanny ability to identify where lucrative projects can be landed – from the booming financial industry in the 1980s to Apple in the 2000s, and with 40 per cent of the firm's revenue now generated in the Middle East.
This has sometimes been associated with criticisms, particularly over the ecological impact of some Foster + Partners projects or the regimes it works with. It is currently working on a secretive plan for a two-kilometre-tall skyscraper in Saudi Arabia, among many other projects in the country.
Whatever the significance of his savviness, Owen Hopkins and others contend that Foster's ability to ensure his studio keeps turning out effective buildings is even more striking.
His futuristic airport terminals, skyscrapers, museums, and public buildings have sprung up all over the world. Among the most famous are the 180-meter-tall London "gherkin", the Millennium Bridge, and the New York building Hearst Tower. Foster revels in modern lightweight materials, with glass being his favorite material. He is also known for the reconstruction of the German Reichstag building.
His signature is most evident in central London. Opened in 2004, Foster's former building for the Swiss Re insurance company, which Londoners call the "gherkin," looks like a gigantic glass and steel teardrop that landed in the City of London near the Thames. Among the surrounding houses and churches, it appears as an object from an extraterrestrial civilization. The 41-story tower consumes 50 percent less energy than similar buildings and utilizes daylight that flows in through its glazed sections.
Also made of glass and steel is his building New City Hall, which sits on the opposite bank of the Thames like a massive tilted egg. It leans out to the side at a thirty-degree angle, limiting sun exposure from the south while maximizing light access from the north: "The lack of energy is a global problem. Instead of energy-intensive family homes, we need skyscrapers that can be built and operated as efficiently as possible."
Foster imagined a pedestrian bridge spanning the Thames as a "light blade cutting through the river" to celebrate the new millennium in 2000. However, the elegant footbridge wobbled unpleasantly after opening and earned its creator the nickname Lord Wobbly.
In the reconstruction of the Berlin Reichstag, Foster wanted to cover the entire building with a glass canopy. However, that did not go through. Instead, he designed a roof in the shape of a glass dome with a viewing ramp and an automatically controlled system of mirrors that illuminate the plenary hall. The dome also acts as a reservoir of air for the natural ventilation system. It is surrounded by spiral ramps providing a panoramic view. In Germany, he is also known for the 257-meter-tall Commerzbank Tower in Frankfurt am Main, the tallest building in the country.
In 2005, another Foster giant, the highest bridge by height of the bridge structure, cut through the deep valley of the French river Tarn near the town of Millau. This impressive structure connects sections of highway between Clermont-Ferrand and Béziers, significantly shortening the connection between northern France and the Mediterranean and Spain. Its roadway is 32 meters wide, running up to 270 meters above the ground, and the tallest of its seven pylons reaches a height of 343 meters, surpassing the Eiffel Tower by 19 meters. The bridge is supported by seven slender concrete pillars (the shortest is 77 meters, the tallest 343 meters), to which pylons holding steel cables support the deck.
In September 2024, Foster + Partners was commissioned by Manchester United football club to develop a master plan for the Old Trafford neighborhood. In March 2025, the architects presented their proposal to the public.
