Norman Foster: ‘The older I get, the more I realise it’s not about the building but about the city’

There is something a little strange about ascending the long escalators of the Pompidou Centre to visit a show about Norman Foster. This is Richard Rogers’ greatest building, perhaps the pinnacle of the style known as High Tech which characterised British architecture in the late 20th century. Its greatest proponents were Rogers (who died in 2021) and Foster, who started in practice together in the 1960s after meeting at Yale.

This show, then, Foster’s first major retrospective and the biggest architecture exhibition ever to be held at the Pompidou, feels like a coda for an era. But not for Foster. “I always had this idea that the future will be better than the past,” he says, walking around the gallery. Still? “Absolutely!” he snaps back with just the faintest tinge of a Manchester accent.

Foster, it has always been clear, is a big believer in technology. The boyhood obsessions are here, right on the walls — an Eagle comic, a cutaway section of an aeroplane, reminiscences about the steam trains that used to run behind his house. It is there in the cars: Buckminster Fuller’s teardrop-shaped 1933 Dymaxion, Le Corbusier’s beautiful 1926 Voisin C7 Lumineuse. (“Not the type of car that belonged to Corb,” Foster stresses, “but the actual car. We tracked it down in a kind of detective story to a farm in England and I bought it.”) And technology is there right at the end of the exhibition too, in a room devoted to building on the Moon and on Mars, projects that the architect’s practice and foundation are currently working on.

In between are some of the most sublime buildings of the modern age along with, it must be said, a fair number of structures which bring the exhibition’s rather banal subtitle, Sustainable Futures, into doubt, including vast airports from Jordan to Beijing. At the heart of the show is the paradox that the figure who is without doubt the world’s most successful architect maintains that childhood faith in technology to solve problems which it is itself causing.

The exhibition opens with a long, double-sided vitrine of Foster’s sketchbooks, beginning with his schoolboy notes. An incredible array of designs and ideas highlight the architect’s facility for clarity, each sketch embodying a solution to a problem which, once you have seen it, appears like the only rational response. Take the structures of the Sainsbury Centre in Norwich and Hong Kong’s HSBC HQ (then the most expensive building ever) or a design for a multifunctional table. On the wall is his first student project, a sailing club, stamped “University of Manchester”. A little further on is the model of the Monaco Yacht Club. He knew where he was going.

Unlike Rogers, who had a privileged upbringing and whose father’s cousin was a famous architect in Italy, Foster had a less certain start. “It never even occurred to me that there was a possibility of being an architect,” he says. “I didn’t know any architects. But I did read. I borrowed Le Corbusier’s Toward an Architecture and books on Frank Lloyd Wright from the local library.” Having left school at 16, Foster was working in the Treasurer’s Office at Manchester Town Hall, the vast gothic building designed by Alfred Waterhouse which he credits for reinforcing his love of architecture. “Because I’d left school,” he says, “I didn’t have A-levels and couldn’t get into university, but I was allowed to present a portfolio of drawings and [Manchester university] created a precedent for me, a special diploma.”

Foster is known as the most driven of architects, almost inhumanly so. His PR says this is the first time she can remember when he has been in a single city for such a long period — three weeks. Famous at one time for flying himself to meetings, often literally blowing away competing architects as he arrived piloting his own helicopter, I have to remind myself that this trim, lively figure in front of me is almost 88.

He now resides in Switzerland rather than London, where his office overlooks the Thames at Battersea (a glass box which is one of his most exquisite buildings) and where he has had more influence than any architect since Sir Christopher Wren: a new master plan for Trafalgar Square, a new roof for the British Museum, an entirely new Wembley Stadium, the Millennium Bridge, the wonderful Canary Wharf Station, the Gherkin (which kick-started the City’s new tower cluster), Bloomberg’s huge HQ. “The older I get,” he says, “the more I realise it’s not about the building but about the city.” Yet that bigger story of the city feels a little absent here amid the models.

As ever, though, Foster is looking forward. A huge model of the new HQ for JPMorgan Chase rears up above the exhibition, a massive skyscraper redefining Manhattan’s Midtown skyline. With its stepped profile, it nods to the city’s Art Deco zenith, a curious throwback after the demolition of the Union Carbide Building which previously occupied the site, a design by SOM’s Natalie De Blois, a rare woman architect in a midcentury world of men in suits. I ask if he has any regrets about this. “It was a wonderful building,” he replies, “one of my favourites. But it wasn’t my decision to demolish it.” I get the impression this part of the conversation is over.

I ask, instead, about the building we are in, Rogers’ and Renzo Piano’s masterpiece of public architecture. Is the Pompidou a building he wishes he’d designed? No hesitation this time. “No. It’s a seminal building, a great experiment. But it’s a celebration of the systems that drive the building,” with its brightly coloured ducts and tubes on the outside, a contrast to his slick, smoother structures. “The Sainsbury Centre, which was our contemporary equivalent, was the first breathing building, naturally cooled and heated — and it still works.

“Richard and I shared a social agenda. The Pompidou opens its doors to everyone and the Sainsbury Centre dissolved the barriers between academia and the public.”

He’s still building the future. There are mini-nuclear reactors on display which could power a Manhattan city block. There are moon dwellings and aeroplanes alongside his (realised) spaceport in New Mexico. I might see a paradox in all this carbon consumption and faith in the future; Foster doesn’t. “The materials of the Union Carbide Building were 98 per cent recycled to make way for a much more efficient new building. I don’t see a problem there. And the airports, you need to put those into the context of real life. Mobility and globalisation aren’t just going to go away. That’s naive . . . We know that with enough clean energy we can convert seawater to jet fuel and decarbonise the oceans . . . the prospect is in sight.” Well, if anyone can convince you, Foster can.

To August 7, centrepompidou.fr