Back to the future: Norman Foster at the Centre Pompidou

This piece follows on from Eleanor Beaumont’s Outrage on starchitect retrospectives, published in the AR Museums issue

In 2012, four of the most famous architects competed for the design of a tower at 425 Park Avenue in Manhattan, New York City: Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas, Richard Rogers and Norman Foster. While three of the four mumbled in front of PowerPoint slides and rendered videos, Foster stood in front of an easel, jacketless, changing and pointing to physical boards. Indicating a visualisation of the New York skyline, he quipped, ‘I forgot I did add, right at the last moment – I put the building in here!’, as if he was on Photoshop at 2am that morning, adding the tower pixel by pixel. ‘It fits very, very beautifully.’

Foster + Partners won the competition, and the building was completed in 2022. The contest was won by Foster’s unshakeable confidence and clarity, but also the impression that he was personally responsible for every detail of the design – the boards for 425 Park Avenue included hand-drawn diagrams, prominently featuring Foster’s handwriting.

Norman Foster’s hand is present throughout the Centre Pompidou’s retrospective

Credit: The Norman Foster Foundation

Projects, such as 2000’s Millennium Bridge in London, have been selected for their ‘iconicity’

Credit: Nigel Young / Foster + Partners

Foster’s hand is conspicuously present in the colossal exhibition of his work at the Centre Pompidou in Paris (10 May–7 August 2023). An extensive selection of the architect’s hand drawings open the show, the earliest a spread from his notebook when he was a 13-year-old student at Burnage Grammar School for Boys, which he left at 16 to start work as a clerk. At the age of 21, he was offered a place to study architecture at Manchester University.

The drawings included in the exhibition from this time at university are some of the most endearing works on display: a glamorous boathouse from first year; Heath Robinson-style drawings of an old mill; fashionable New Town-inspired streetscapes. A brief stint as part of Team 4, with Wendy Cheesman (who he would go on to marry), Su Brumwell and Richard Rogers followed graduation, and in 1968 he and Cheesman established Foster Associates. Housed in long vitrines, sketchbooks from this time show evidence of the architect working details out, resolving tricky corners, thinking through drawing. Catchy aphorisms shout among the details (‘keep it simple stupid’). A ‘note to self’ reminds the younger Foster to maintain ‘confidence to turn down other work’.

A sketch for Foster + Parters’ Hong Kong International Airport from 1998. The firm’s continued pursuit of airport projects has been widely criticised, following its decision to join – and later leave – climate change group Architects Declare

Credit: The Norman Foster Foundation

Later drawings are more mediated, more conscious of the audience they are destined for. These are no longer drawings to think through, but compelling ‘parti’ diagrams to communicate ideas to big clients – though still studiously and deliberately hand-drawn. Foster himself is omnipresent in the exhibition: all the wall texts are signed ‘NF’ ‘in order to address visitors directly’, he explains. Perhaps conscious of this omnipotence, the exhibition includes a wall-sized list of the ‘10,000 colleagues whose contributions from 1963 made this exhibition possible’ – a generous gesture, though this is where recognition of authorship of others largely ends. In its eagerness to highlight Foster’s ‘hand’, elsewhere the exhibition neglects to credit the hands of others, particularly the authors of many of the drawings in the second half of the exhibition – including Helmut Jacoby’s.

Foster’s ‘hands-on approach’ is his USP, his brand, how he sells his buildings – and it sells really well. The show documents the stratospheric rise of a very successful businessman whose company expanded globally like any good transnational corporation. The size of the company (known as Foster + Partners from 1992) roughly doubled nearly every five years between 1980 and 2005, peaking in 2020 with 1,400 employees – a growth that is celebrated in a detailed timeline, included among other milestones (and multiple awards).

In this way, the exhibition holds an unabashed mirror to the world of big architecture firms: an architecture tracked to market indexes, of spreadsheets and HR departments. Foster is one of the only architects to be so financially successful: he is the world’s richest architect, worth £170 million (US$240 million) in 2021. (He is trailed by Frank Gehry, worth less than half as much at US$100 million.)

Foster + Partners’ prize-winning headquarters for Bloomberg (2017), a sponsor of the Pompidou exhibition

Credit: Nigel Young / Foster + Partners

It is therefore entirely appropriate that the vast second room of the exhibition resembles an opulent and beautiful showroom of projects and their clients. The curation is unapologetically and deliberately a ‘greatest hits’ approach; curator Frédéric Migayrou explains that his team selected the ‘most iconic’ projects, so that ‘everyone can find a project they know’. The Bloomberg HQ (AR February 2019) is prominently positioned and furnished with an enormous lavish model, complete with working lights. Bloomberg sponsored the show, alongside JP Morgan Chase, the headquarters of which Foster + Partners are currently building at 270 Park Avenue in New York City. Accordingly, the exhibition’s production value is dizzying: around 40 per cent of the models and fragments were made especially for the exhibition, including several back-lit, model railway-style dioramas.

An assortment of gleaming vehicles on display at the centre of the exhibition add to the sparkling showroom feel. Alongside a futuristic Dymaxion car and a small plane suspended from the ceiling is Le Corbusier’s car, the 1926 Voisin C7 Lumineuse, which Foster personally tracked down for his sizeable personal collection. He is also a qualified pilot who reportedly flies his private plane and helicopter between his multiple homes around the globe. Foster + Partners’ many airport designs are also proudly featured, despite bringing the practice repeated controversy and causing the firm’s withdrawal from the climate action group Architects Declare in 2020.

In the show’s concluding room, Foster reassures visitors that the future is one of droneports ‘where clean energy sources are available in abundance’ – no need for that paradigmatic shift away from endless capitalist growth, then – what a relief! It is here that the paradox of the exhibition comes uncomfortably to the fore. Despite Foster’s insistence that this ‘is not a Retrospective but, rather, a Futurespective’, proposals for a post-carbon future are noticeably thin on the ground, while relics of fossil capitalism abound. Among the models of concrete towers and airports, the claim that ‘this exhibition traces the themes of sustainability’ rings hollow.

‘Lunar habitation’, as envisaged by Norman Foster in 2012

Credit:  ESA / Foster + Partners

The exhibition celebrates the legacy of one of the most famous and wealthiest architects in the world with an extravagance commensurate to his impact; as a retrospective, the show is a glittering success. However, those coming to terms with the impending climate crisis, considering the seismic and all-encompassing changes required to ensure our future on this planet, may leave this exhibition feeling strangely disquieted. Most people attentive to the likely realities of the next decades on Earth are, to say the least, apprehensive about the future. Not Foster: ‘I still believe that the future will be better than the past,’ he says. ‘Absolutely.’ It’s a delusion on which capitalism and big business depend. I didn’t ask for whom the future will be better; that seems to go without saying. Visitors to this exhibition will come away in no doubt as to how we careered, and continue to career, headlong into this profit-driven ecological catastrophe.

This piece follows on from Eleanor Beaumont’s Outrage on starchitect retrospectives, published in the AR Museums issue