Lord of the Lines

He designs buildings for sustainability, transforms entire cities, and redefines skyscrapers and bridges. A visit with Lord Norman Foster, who may well be the most influential architect of our time. On Apple’s new building in Cupertino, the unique qualities of the Reichstag dome, and his close relationship with two Porsche 356s.

The mural extends nearly fifty feet in length and ten in height. An old Sumatran technique was used to weave fourteen different shades of thread together. It shows British artist Grayson Perry’s own epic interpretation of William Shakespeare’s “Seven Ages of Man.” Seven stages in the life of a man were integrated into this single all-encompassing work of art. In front of the tapestry stand two Porsche 356s. Welcome to the garage of star architect Lord Norman Foster. At eighty-five years of age, he is still a live wire with a firm grasp on the wheel. We look at a life in seven acts.

Act one—Manchester

June 1935. Norman Foster is born in Stockport, England. He grows up in the working-class city of Manchester. As a child, he writes an essay that wins him a spot at a high school. The essay describes a racing duel on the Nürburgring. “I realized I was fascinated by race cars. Especially Porsche’s designs with rear-wheel drive,” he recalls. “For me these cars are works of art like futuristic sculptures.”

For economic reasons, Foster leaves school at the age of sixteen, taking a job at a municipal agency. Books and magazines are the primary source of inspiration in his youth. The Eagle, a maverick weekly mixture of futurism, technology, and architecture, features Dan Dare on its cover. This comic-book hero is a pilot. Foster begins to dream of flying. His first adventure born of science and fiction will soon become reality.

Act two—Royal Air Force

Foster’s passion for airspace prompts him to do military service with the Royal Air Force. Although his everyday tasks at a radar station are on the ground, years later he earns his first pilot’s license. Aircraftsman Foster 2709757 continues to fly helicopters and jet planes to this day.

After his military training, he needs a job and there’s no way he wants to return to the joyless atmosphere of the municipal agency. He finds his next great inspiration in a library in Levenshulme, and treasures Le Corbusier’s book Vers une architecture to this day. “I was hypnotized by the designs,” he says. His application portfolio for the architecture program at the University of Manchester is accepted. A bold design for a windmill earns Foster an award when he’s only in his second semester. The design for a house with a motorboat docking almost in the living room is another example of how he stands out from his fellow students.

Act three—Yale

In 1961, Foster wins a fellowship at Yale. American architectural treatments of form and function have long since caught his attention. In the lead-up to the Second World War, many leading European thinkers had left the continent and were making their multi-story dreams come true on the other side of the Atlantic. They included greats such as Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Foster enjoys his time at Yale. Visionaries like Richard Buckminster Fuller and Paul Rudolph drive him to new heights of performance. Foster and fellow student Richard Rogers drive a VW Beetle across the USA, drawn as if by magic to buildings by Frank Lloyd Wright and Charles Eames. Structures based on modular systems leave a lasting impression. After completing his degree at Yale, Foster works for a few months in San Francisco. There he falls in love with the lines of the Porsche 356. “The car had a cult status in California. It was actually a niche product, but every time I took my MGA in for servicing, there were a lot of them around. Even the head designer at my office drove one. I was immediately fascinated by the form and the idea of this car.”

Act four—Team 4

Foster, Richard Rogers, Foster’s future wife Wendy Cheesman, and her sister Georgie found the Team 4 architectural office in 1963. One of the first designs wins the RIBA Award from the Royal Institute of British Architects—and memorializes Foster’s passion for flying. One part of the award-winning Creek Vean house in Cornwall, England, evokes a cockpit partially submerged in the ground. With their mixtures of traditional and industrial materials the four architects stand out from the mainstream, and their work even finds its way into movie theaters. Film director Stanley Kubrick uses Skybreak House in the English town of Radlett in 1971 to shoot his blockbuster A Clockwork Orange.

Act seven—Chesa Futura and the 356

Some 250,000 hand-cut larch shingles make up the façade of this building. Viewed from the opposite side of the lake, it blends into the hues of the Swiss mountain landscape. Chesa futura means “house of the future” in Romansch, the original language of the canton of Grisons. Foster places his private residential complex in the middle of the Swiss ski resort of St. Moritz—where it resembles a spaceship on earth.

“Chesa Futura is very alive,” says its creator, “just like my Porsche here.” Foster’s Fish Silver Grey 356 has a split window, which marks it as an early model from the Stuttgart production. “The way the car reflects Chesa’s form and vice versa—isn’t that wonderful?” He loves driving on the winding roads and over the mountain passes of his adopted home. Yet the odometer shows only around 6,000 kilometers. “That will probably change now that my youngest son has his driver’s license,” says Foster with a smile, and proceeds to recount the early history of his 356. “It was delivered to a buyer in Hamburg in October of 1950. In 1955, it was bought by RAF squadron leader Robert ‘Porky’ Munro, who imported it to Great Britain and registered it with a license plate reading UXB 12 for ‘unexploded bomb.’ In 1957, Munro became the head test pilot for the Hawker-Siddeley Kestrel, the prototype for the Harrier Jump Jet—one of my favorite designs.” With a ski rack on its roof, Foster’s black 356 C Cabriolet stands ready for the impromptu cross-country ski excursions that Foster loves. “The glamour that people associate with the 356 these days belies its roots,” he notes in a philosophical tone of voice. “It was developed at a time of scarcity and made of the parts available in the postwar years.”

Lord Norman Foster, who counted his pence as a child in order to reach for the skies in his dreams with comic-book hero Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future, and whose architectural daring then in fact made him a “pilot of the future,” is thankful. “I value these sports cars very much, like I do my life. It is a privilege to still be able to enjoy every drive.”