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FADE IN FIRST CARDBOARD 00:19 1. EVERYTHING INSPIRES ME, SOMETIMES I ASK MYSELF IF I SEE THINGS WHICH OTHERS DON’T SEE. NORMAN FOSTER SECONSCARDBOARD 01:28 2.- HOW MUCH DOES YOUR BUILDING WEIGH, MR FOSTER? A SINGLE MAN THE SIZE OF AN ANT WALKING ACROSS A HUGE WHITE, HAZY SNOWSCAPE. TITLE & CREDITS NOW THE SNOWSCAPE IS COVERED WITH CROSS-COUNTRY SKIERS. ONE OF THE SKIERS IS: NORMAN FOSTER NORMAN AT CHESA FUTURA

DEYAN If you look at how Norman looks, always dressed in a very particular kind of style, it reflects the quality of his architecture very much. It has that sense of doing things precisely, carefully, consideredly. But you could also say that there’s something about his architecture which is hard to read. How do you understand a building, which is a black-glassed curved screen, you don’t quite know what going on inside that and maybe that’s Norman also.

DRAWINGS BY NF – REVERSE ANGLE OF CHESA FUTURA, FOLLOWED BY A VARIETY OF SKETCHES –

NORMAN The first drawing I can remember making was of an aircraft and it was… it used the only knowledge of aircraft that I had first hand which was a model aircraft with the high wings, the ribs, and the source of power was, you know, rubber, I mean strands of rubber, but this was on a Herculean scale, you know, I was up there several storeys above the ground with the joy stick and the lever that would unleash these kilometers of rubber that would turn this. And I obviously had this fantasy that, you

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know, I was sitting there in control of this great craft. I can remember the drawing very well.

2. THE MILLAU VIADUCT

DEYAN You can see all kinds of reasons why Norman, throughout his life, has been so fascinated by flight. There is of course the beauty of the artefact. The way that a wing curves over an engine, the way that the rivets bring together pieces of metal. There is also of course the sense of being in control and command. If he had been taught to fly when he was in the Royal Air Force, there’s no question that the world would have lost an architect. He would have become a pilot. NORMAN Ascending a building like the Eiffel Tower changed the way a lot of people saw the world. They literally saw it in another perspective and that’s reflected in the paintings. I think as an architect if you’re privileged to be able to enjoy that dimension of flight. To be able to see how awesome nature is, and the forces of nature, to be able to fly vast distances at high speeds with no engine on solar power and to able to literally almost sniff out the rising air from the sinking air and to remain aloft. But, it’s also about challenges and it’s the poetic dimension. It’s something I never tire of, never will. DEYAN There is something that is nothing short of awe inspiring about the idea of a bridge marching forward through a landscape on a series of giant legs the scale of skyscrapers. It even wiggles as you’re driving across so you can see how spectacular it looks. We’d forgotten that useful things could be this beautiful.

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3. NORMAN’S DRAWINGS NORMAN SITTING AT THE ROUND TABLE DRAWING.

DEYAN Norman never stops drawing, he communicates in the most effective way through a sharp pencil and a beautiful block of paper. In his cars there are fresh notepads and freshly sharpened pencils, just in case something comes to him.

A SERIES OF DETAILS OF NORMAN’S DRAWINGS

DEYAN He is always drawing—drawing, drawing, drawing. It’s the way he thinks, it’s the way he argues points. You can see the buildings take shape. His lines are very spare but very expressive in a very economical way, just like Norman.

TONY HUNT 07:47

I think he’s the most self-motivated person I’ve ever met without a doubt. He has passions, he has a passion for architecture, he has a passion for skiing, and Langlaufing. He has a passion for flying which is, I mean, amazing, but, you know, I don’t know now…but he had a commercial pilots licence.

LORD WEIDENFELD 08:09

He wants to conquer weakness, conquer infirmity, conquer weakness in a sense that he wants to show how far one can do through will power.

RICHARD ROGERS 08:15

I came from a sort of continental, mother-father, upper middle class, so Norman really made it himself. I am full of admiration for that

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but it made him very much know from the beginning where he is going to go.

4. MANCHESTER

CLOSE-UP OF A RAILROAD TRACKS NORMAN RETURNS TO HIS HOME IN MANCHESTER.

NORMAN I remember hearing bombers go over the house in the middle of the night with my mother. I remember talking rationally about, you know, what kind of bomber it might be and just breaking down into a flood of tears. Just being absolutely abjectly terrified.

FOTOS OF NORMAN AS A CHILD

DEYAN Norman was an only child. He was born in the meanstreets of Manchester, just after the Great Depression. Robert, his father managed a pawn broker’s shop. His mother Lilly became a waitress.

BONO 09:40

My voice had changed when my father died. My father was a tenor and somehow this was a gift in passing I just found a new voice almost. And I was asking him about his father and what he got from his father and Norman said both from his father and his mother just work ethic. They worked and they worked and they worked. And then he said the only thing was he perhaps as a result of them working so hard, he hadn’t got to know them so well as he would have liked.

NORMAN WALKS UP THE STAIRS TO HIS ROOM

DEYAN This is a very important room, isn’t it? This is where you did those drawings that got you into university?

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NORMAN Yes and when I was at university I had a drawing board here. And this is where I did most of my student work.

THE FACADE OF NORMAN’S HOUSE AND BEDROOM WINDOW

DEYAN One of the things he did for the portfolio to get to university was to draw the view from his bedroom window.

ANIMATION OF NORMAN’S SKETCH OF THE BRIDGE TO THE OTHER WORLD

DEYAN The view he had was of a railway line which went right past his window at eye level and he would’ve been out there looking at these big black steam engines rushing past throwing out smoke and cinders. Under the track there’s a passageway that goes from Norman’s street which is humble, poor. You can smell the damp. But you go through this tunnel under the railway and you find yourself suddenly in a middle-class suburb with trees on the streets and detached villas. And you realise of course that Norman was on the wrong side of the tracks. NORMAN I came from a background where the only honourable work, if you like, was manual work. I moved up into a sort of middle-class world of a guaranteed pension, all the security that my parents never had and which they yearned for me. So I was working in Manchester Town Hall. I find it totally depressing. I mean I’d escape at lunchtime. I would discover Architecture. I didn’t know I was actually discovering Architecture, it was only afterwards I realised it. I’d be looking at buildings. My escape route was a bicycle to get me out of that environment into other kinds of worlds. DEYAN When he came out of the Air Force, he was

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lucky enough to be recommended to do a job working in a firm of architects, not as a designer, but as an assistant to the guy that ran the building contracts. NORMAN I plucked up courage to talk to the most junior person in the drawing office. And I remember challenging this guy and saying what do you think of Frank Lloyd Wright? And Frank Lloyd Wright was one of my passions through the local library, you know, like Le Corbusier and so on. So I then started to engage individuals in conversation: How do you become an architect? What do you have to do? Well, you have to have a portfolio. How do you get a portfolio? Well I dunno! I mean, its drawings! So I’d be drawing out of the bedroom window, I’d be taking drawings home from Beardshaw’s, copying them in the evening. And then, I thought I had to tell the boss, so I knocked on the door of John Beardshaw and I said you know I just have to tell you I’m going to apply to be an architect. But you have to have a portfolio. I’ve got a portfolio. How can you have a portfolio? So I told him I took his drawings home in the evening. So he said you have to bring it in the next day, which I did. He said, you know, you’re a square peg in a round hole. And he gave me an office, a T-square, a book of graphic standards and gave me a project, a house. So that was a turning point.

5. SWISS RE-NORMAN’S DESIGN DEYAN The essence of Norman’s architecture is that design can make things work better. And it’s a very optimistic belief. Architecture can make your life feel better. On a small scale, it transformed his adolescent bedroom in the suburbs of Manchester. Later, it could take him away from that narrow world and make almost anything possible. NORMAN Architecture, I guess, for me is something that moves the spirit, that really works in terms of

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all the senses. In that sense it’s about the things that you can measure you can quantify and, if you like, the spiritual dimension which is rooted in all of the senses and which you can’t measure. But you know it’s there. It moves you. It moves your spirit.

6. YALE NORMAN FLYING IN A HELICOPTER OVER NEW YORK VIA NEW HAVEN. HE WALKS INTO YALE.

NORMAN This was the school of architecture, unbelievable... The same ceiling, the extraordinary staircase... Difficult to imagine it... Very familiar.

DEYAN Yale, in 1961, was still under the spell of modernism. Paul Rudolph, the Dean had been a student of Walther Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus, and the fire of the modern movement was still alive. Yale was full of strong teachers, but it was dominated Rudolph. He was the man who taught Foster how draw like an architect, and even how to look like one. Rudolph also made him cry. He used the words: “You don’t care enough” to Norman, after he had been up all night, working on a project.

PAUL GOLDBERGER 17:34

Yale never had a kind of ideology and Rudolf was particularly good at bringing out the best of every student. He was tough on them. He was famously tough and rigorous but it was about bringing what you wanted to do.

CARL ABBOTT 17:52

Rudolf really encouraged Norman. He really pushed him. With most of us, he pushed us or you’d be out, but I think he pushed Norman more than anybody in our group. I think he saw things in Norman that most of us did not

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see then. NORMAN I worked on this building. I did a lot of drawing on the perspectives so if you just took a photograph of this I can show you an extraordinary drawing which was probably about so big where I was drawing line after line after line.

PHOTOS OF SERGE CHERMAYEFF DEYAN Also on the teaching staff was Serge Chermayeff. He wanted them to think about communities, about how they worked. And he was the one who was pushing Norman to thinking about how you design a whole world, a whole environment.

PHOTOS OF VINCENT SCULLY DEYAN Vincent Scully, the other great force there was the historian, who was passionate about making architecture come alive for his students.

RICHARD ROGERS 18:52

Vince Scully and Rudolf were very much about the visual, how you saw things, how you approached things, how things unwound as you looked at them from different angles.

SHOTS OF AMERICA – ON THE ROAD DEYAN Scully was the one who encouraged both Norman and Richard to drive across America. They went on pilgrimages to look at great architecture.

CARL ABBOTT 19:13 As we drove into the city of Chicago in my VW car, and it had one of those windows in the top, the whole crew, not Sue but Richard and Norman kept, and it was freezing, I mean it

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was like snow everywhere, wanting the top to be open while we were driving so they could take photographs of the oil derricks and the big things all around Chicago going into the city. DEYAN It was where the idea that they would start a partnership one day was born.

MONTAGE OF CHICAGO 1950-60’s

ALAIN DE BOTTON 20:10

Having being inspired initially by American architects, Foster had then returned later in his career to remind Americans of lessons they gave the world originally but subsequently forgot. So he’s like many people of his generation, someone who admired America, perhaps more than it deserved at the time, and is kind of more enthusiastic about America than the Americans are themselves because America isn’t quite maybe what Foster imagined it to be. He had a romantic vision of America.

7. NEW YORK – HEARST – ART & ARCHITECTURE

NORMAN Just going back it’s Manhattan, it’s New York, it’s the skyline. It’s the city of towers. You think of skyscrapers, it’s New York. The good news is that we have a tower in New York. The bad news is that it’s a very, very small tower amongst the most extraordinary collection of mega-towers. And how do you make this tower have a presence when it’s physically so small?

ANISH KAPOOR 21:31

Scale, is not the same thing as size. Scale is a quantity of somewhat abstract proportions. It has, it bears a relationship to, at one level, to the body. But it bears a bigger relationship to the imagination. The way the pyramids in Egypt do. Whatever you do, you walk up them,

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you walk around them, they remain the scale they are, which is somehow bigger than what they really are.

PAUL GOLDBERGER 21:55 When the Hearst building was finished, I called Foster the Mozart of modernism. Because I thought that that conveyed the way his work seems sort of lyrical, elegant and effortless. And just as we know with Mozart there was huge effort behind all that, but part of his genius was to produce this finished piece of music that didn’t show the effort. It just seemed to sort of dance perfectly through the air. But, Foster buildings tend to do that. They don’t show their effort. NORMAN That diagrid, the triangulation not only produces something, which is inherently stronger. And we can go back in terms of antecedents, to Buckminster Fuller, Barnes Wallace and those aircraft of the late thirties… Structures in nature which are triangulated, inherently stronger, using twenty per cent less steel, a good start in terms of the sustainability story, especially when eighty per cent of that is recycled steel. DEYAN The Hearst Tower set out to be as green as possible. But, magically, it also manages to come up with a new geometry no New York skyscraper had ever tried before. The corners look as if they dissolve into thin air.

RICHARD SERRA 23:24

I like the building in New York and I told him that and he said it was too squat. And I said no, that’s wrong, I think the muscularity that building I like. I think that’s a very good building.

ANTHONY CARO 23:40

The trouble with so much sculpture is the larger it gets, the worse it gets. And I think the

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architect understand how when something is put outside in the open air it changes, the air eats into it and it has to be richer and it has to be altogether different. And all these things, we haven’t even got to first base on and architects know all about it, so we can learn from them on this.

SHOTS OF RICHARD LONG PAINTING THE RIVERLINES AT THE HEARST

NORMAN I’m fascinated by the work of artists, and the relationship between space and works of art, the synergy between a painting, a sculpture, a furniture. The way that those come together, which is a kind of endless personal pursuit.

RICHARD LONG 24:40

Given my love of water of stones and mud and raw materials, and also like the fact that the first human habitation, the first natural place for people to live in was caves, Norman has chosen a neolithical artist to make his point. (Faltan risas en montaje)

8. TEAM FOUR

DEYAN Norman would have stayed in America. He was happy there. He felt at home there. He had a job in San Francisco. But he kept in touch with Richard Rogers and the idea of forming a practice in London came up when Rogers got a project. Norman joined him. He could always go back if it didn’t work. So Norman got back on the plane and flew back to Europe to discover that Team 4 wasn’t exactly this big professional office.

TONY HUNT 25:50

It was actually in Norman and Wendy’s flat. It was in a house, you know in Hampstead Hill Gardens. I’ll never forget it. And they used to have to reorganize the flat every morning to turn it from a flat into an office. And of course if they were having a client to see them, they had

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to do all sorts of things. I remember they had this enormous great white wooden box that covered the bed and they used to put models on the box so it looked like a sort of display unit. It really was a scream.

DEYAN

Team Four was where Foster met his first wife, Wendy. They worked with Richard Rogers and his first wife, Sue. And also Georgie Walton, Wendy’s sister. It was a short-lived partnership that lasted only three years. Their first big job was the Reliance Controls Factory, just outside Swindon, which was the first British hi-tech building.

RICHARD ROGERS 26:40

The Reliance Controls was the first really successful building in terms of…it won the Financial Times award and we thought: “We’ve made it”. An inquiry we got, because somebody wanted to know how to clean the floor of the factory, so it didn’t really make it.

NORMAN It was an extraordinary time, almost like a pop group in a way, where all the things that brought these individuals together eventually had the seeds of the things that would provoke them to go in their own directions, in a relatively short period afterwards.

9. INDUSTRIAL ARCHITECTURE – OLSEN FOTOS OF NORMAN & WENDY

DEYAN Team Four split up, and it was time for a new start. Norman & Wendy decided to stay in London, and together they formed Foster Associates.

NORMAN SPEAKING BEFORE AN AUDIENCE AT THE GREAT COURT NORMAN

If I think back to 1967, then really Foster and Partners was formed, or rather, it was at that

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time two people: my late wife, Wendy, and I, who formed Foster Associates. There were only two problems. First of all, we had no work, and there were no associates. DEYAN Without the connections that architects need to get their first jobs, the one area in which Norman thought he might get a foothold was by going into the uncharted territory of industrial architecture. The Olsen building was the first serious thing Foster built on his own. In those days, Britain was still divided between the workers and the managers. They had separate entrances and facilities. Olsen stood out because it was trying to give the workers something which was as good as everyone else had. You could say it was a socially utopian project.

NORMAN The project for Fred Olsen became a turning point in the sense that buildings like Willis Faber, IBM, the Sainsbury Centre, all visited that building that we did for Fred Olsen.

10. WILLIS FABER DEYAN The Willis Faber office building in Ipswich looked a lot like a giant black glass grand piano. Foster took a radical approach to everything about it, how it looked, how it worked, the techniques used to build it, the comforts it offered its users. Its reduced energy use... NORMAN How do you give glamour to an office building? And in Willis Faber we sought to create a lifestyle so it had a swimming pool in a town, which at that time didn’t have a public swimming pool. It had an atrium. It had plants. And part of that was the color and the shiny ceiling which was a response in a way from some lessons I learnt on the Olsen building. I

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remember the first time walking up the stairway and seeing this green ceiling and thinking: My god, what happened, I thought it was a white ceiling, and of course it was a white ceiling, but it was just sucking the colors. So this ceiling was very subtle, I mean, extraordinary.

11. BUCKIMINSTER FULLER

BUBBLES AND FULLER ON THE BEACH

FULLER I remember the first time ever looking back at the wake of my ship and seeing all those, the whiteness and the form of that… That’s white because it all consists of bubbles. I said, “How many bubbles am I looking at? I’m looking at fantastic numbers of bubbles.” In comes in this wave, look at all the whiteness, all those bubbles. Beautiful, beautiful bubbles, every one of them. I said I‘ve been taught at school, in order to be able to design, because the

bubble is a sphere, you have to use Pi (π) DEYAN Buckminster Fuller was the last of the American eccentric geniuses, a messianic, eve slightly odd figure, who roamed the world in his bow tie giving speeches to students that inevitably went on for at least five hours. Foster jumped at the chance to work with Fuller, and the two began a conversation that never stopped until the day Fuller died.

VARIOUS ANGLES OF FULLER’S CARDBOARD DOME DEYAN Fuller’s big idea was to do more with less, to make the strongest structures using the least amount of resources. He was an engineer, an architect, an ecologist who defied any label. In 1951, he coined the phrase “Spaceship Earth”—the very image of humanity floating on a fragile vessel, lost in the middle of space. NORMAN

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I remember flying into a helicopter to the Sainsbury Centre at the university of East Anglia...

SHOTS OF NORMAN FLYING IN A HELICOPTER OF SAINSBURY CENTER NORMAN ...and then we spent really quite a long time walking around the building, going back into the building through the spaces, talking about it, and when you came back into the restaurant, he drew attention to the way the sun had moved, the shadows had changed. And then he turned around to me and said: “How much does your building weigh, Norman?” And, of course, I didn’t know the answer.

AERIAL OF THE SAINSBURY CENTER DEYAN

How much does your building weigh? And even Norman was stunned into silence. But being Norman, a week later, he had the answer, 5328 tons, most of which was lost in the invisible concrete substructure. NORMAN In the course of finding out how much the building weighed, of course I realised the disproportionate amount weight in the least attractive part of the building. It was an interesting voyage of discovery. So, in a way, Bucky was always provoking, provoking himself, challenging himself and challenging everybody around him. DEYAN Some people would see Fuller as an impossible dreamer with wild ideas about covering Manhattan with a dome. On one level Norman seems so different. He’s an architect who seems to be the personification of the organised and the ordered, and yet it’s clear that Fuller made a real mark on Norman. And I think the difference is that when Norman talks about covering a city with a dome, you believe he could.

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BBC OMNIBUS ARCHIVE FOOTAGE – NORMAN & MATERIALS NORMAN 33:33

Technology is the art of making things. High technology is performance. And this particular material is a high-performance material. A three-foot brick wall... It weighs about half a ton, a concrete wall nine inches, air cavity or three brick walls with air gaps in between. Except the concrete has so many overtones, I mean it really is an unpleasant material. I mean you know, it stains in the wet. It attracts graffiti, no wonder it’s an aggressive material. This is a sandwich panel, nice and light, weighs but a few ounces, not half a ton, lets the light through very beautifully. Compare that with this concrete wall, half a ton of brick works. They are all the same performance.

12. THE SAINSBURY CENTER & THE SAINSBURYS

DEYAN The Sainsbury Center was a vision from another planet, a stunning optimistic view of what architecture could be. It was like an elegant and refined machine that had the classical precision of a Greek temple, sitting in a green landscape. It was built to house the art collection of Robert and Lisa Sainsbury, two remarkable patrons who helped make Foster's career possible.

SPENCER DE GREY 35:54

The really good buildings come out of a strong dialogue between the architect and the client. And the more pressure the client puts on the architect, in a creative way, I think the better the product. The work the Norman and the team did at the Sainsbury Center was nit-picking and meticulous, going through every issue. And I think it shows in the end product. DEYAN The Sainsburys and Foster developed a close

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personal relationship. They became something like surrogate parents. Finished in 1978, Robert Sainsbury called the center the finest thing in his collection.

ARCHIVE FOOTAGE OF THE SAINSBURY CENTER DEYAN

If you could put the Sainsbury Centre next HSBC, the Hong Kong and Shanghai bank in Hong Kong... CUT TO:

13. HSBC THE UNDERBELLY OF THE HSBC, FOLLOWED BY A SERIES OF ANGLES

DEYAN

...you would see the difference between a glider and a jumbo jet. They are both about forms of flight, about new ways of dealing with materials. The massive exposed structure, the diagonal braces, the bridge structure of the Hong Kong & Shanghai bank makes it a weighty building; one which is soaring towards the sky. It’s powerful, it’s dynamic, where the Sainsbury Centre is calm and floating. It was the first time that anybody outside America had made a skyscraper that looked like it wasn’t just a copy of an American original.

DAVID NELSON 37:04

Everything has to be brought in to Hong Kong. They don’t build buildings there. The materials, the skills and the expertise have historically always been brought in from outside. And on that project, we were very much encouraged to try and find whatever was the best and most appropriate throughout the whole world. So we went of to America and Japan and Europe and everywhere to try and bring the best things at that moment in time for that project. And what it taught us, really, is that there is a big world out

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there.

DEYAN Norman went back to first principles, deconstructed the skyscraper and made his own rules. He put the structure on the outside, a move that created some remarkable spaces. It was beautifully, built. And, it was a landmark that was internationally recognized, a symbol for the bank, and its commitment to Hong Kong before the handover to China.

THE PACE PICKS UP AND WE END UP ON A NIGHT SHOT OF THE HSBC NORMAN We’d never done the tall building before so we were hungry for the opportunity. But we also borrowed up to the hilt. And we were taking massive risks. And I suppose in a way you are always taking risks. Then we were gambling, if you like with the bank in the sense that if we had not won that competition, we probably wouldn’t be having that conversation now. We’d have gone bankrupt.

14. FOSTER ASSOCIATES, THE DEATH OF WENDY & BLACK FRIDAY

DEYAN Norman had come a long way by the time that he finished the bank. He’d transformed his life. He'd become a very successful, very visible architect. He had built an astonishing project in Hong Kong which the world came to see. It was called the most expensive building the world had ever seen. He looked as if he was the top of his game. But just when things seemed to be going so well, some bad things began to happen. The financial position of the practice was seriously weakened with the end of the monthly fee coming in from Hong Kong to pay the overheads. There was a series of black Fridays, he had to let people go, and he began to worry even about being able to survive.

PHOTO OF WENDY SHOT THROUGH A PRISM MOVES OUT THE FRAME,

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GOES TO BLACK. DEYAN At about the same time, Wendy, who'd been so important to make the practice work, became sick. She had cancer. She died. NORMAN It was a terrible time. And what can seem absolutely tragic and devastating at the time, still obviously has a tragic dimension if many years later you look back on it. But on the other hand, life has moved on, we’ve all moved on. And you have a better measure of satisfaction, of friendship, of love, of whatever...

15. NORMAN’S SOURCES OF INSPIRATION ARCHIVE FOOTAGE OF NORMAN HIGH IN THE SKY INSIDE THE GLASS BUBBLE OF A GLIDER CANOPY

NORMAN Many times I think I need the silence. And it’s not an escape. It’s a kind of complimentary activity. At times it’s so completely absorbing, but there are other times when you’re cross-country skiing, when you’re cycling, you can reflect. And often I find solutions to designs. There are many dimensions to those pursuits. Obviously they’re about pleasure, but they’re so inextricably linked with what I do as a designer.

WE FINISH WITH NORMAN RIDING THE BIKE THROUGH THE CASA DE CAMPO, THEN CUT TO: 16. NORMAN GOES GLOBAL – THE BIG LEAGUES—FOSTER AND PARTNERS A MONTAGE OF IMAGES OF FOSTER DESIGNS AND STRUCTURES

DEYAN Foster has become placeless to quite an extraordinary extent. Brushes with bankruptcy have overshadowed many architects’ careers, so once Foster had the chance to work outside Britain, he saw building a global practice as the

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key to survival. Downturns on one continent can be compensated for by booms on another. The experience of working on a worldwide scale has transformed Foster, and his work. You can see now that there’s a certain level of impatience with the way old Europe does things. He wants to bring home what he’s learned.

NARINDER SAGOO The approach is always to go there and to experience it, and to live it. And to… if it’s people, you live with the people. You take your own human camera, as it were. And there’s no substitute or that. Norman’s always taught us that, that you must do it, which is one of the reasons why he’s always the first one on the sites.

A QUICK MONTAGE OF NORMAN GOING IN AND OUT OF BUILDINGS, CARS, AIRCRAFT, TV INTERVIEWS. NORMAN WALKS INTO THE FRONT DOOR AT BATTERSEA

THE FOSTER FAMILY POSING FOR A PHOTO IN SLOW MOTION 41:49

NORMAN It’s not a building. And it’s not the physicality of a studio. It’s the philosophy, the way in which beyond my lifespan, that will move on and have it’s own life. That I think is the most difficult design of all, and the one I’m most proud of.

SHOTS OF ARCHITECTS AT WORK AT THE MAIN OFFICE IN BATTERSEA NORMAN

It is a belief in a youth, in the energy of youth, in the optimism of youth. And in the end, the ultimate test is, Do you continue to attract the greatest young talent. And wonderfully, the average age is the same now as when we were two or three people in 1967. It’s still early 30’s, 32.

BEN COWD 45:27

You’re thrown into the deep end. And I think that’s what’s really interesting about this place is how they integrate you into the process. And

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everyone becomes part of that process. All of the projects here are always a journey. You start very-- about the brief and the client. There’s never a stylistic goal that comes from Norman. He doesn’t say “it should look like this” and we develop it for the next years. It’s a whole journey. It’s constantly changing and developing.

A SERIES OF PHOTOS OF FOSTER GEMS

NORMAN As a team, we’ve reinvented the genre, we’ve reinvented the airport, we’ve reinvented the nature of the high-rise building, reinvented the relationship of the old and new in terms of how you create a new life cycle for a historic building, keeping the best of its identity from the past and perhaps, all of this in one way or another, reinvent ourselves in terms of changing circumstances or from experience or knowledge or feeding off of new challenges.

17. POWER & THE REICHSTAG 46:32

DEYAN

Architecture is also about power. It creates the landmarks that cultures of very different kinds have used throughout history to express who and what they are.

NORMAN Whether it’s, you know, the Golden Gate or whether it’s Sidney Harbour, the bridge becomes the symbol of the place, transcends the original function and in that sense I think that the way in which the Reichstag, for example which was very much about creating the democratic forum for reunified Germany has become not only the symbol of the city but it’s become the symbol of the nation.

ARCHIVE FOOTAGE OF THE RED ARMY STORMING THE REICHSTAG DEYAN The capture of the Reichstag at the end of world war two was the defining image of

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Hitler’s defeat. Its reconstruction by a British architect was an equally powerful symbol of the reunification of a very different, democratic Germany.

THE REICHSTAG AS IT IS TODAY – VARIOUS ANGLES THE MODEL OF THE FIRST PROPOSAL

DEYAN Foster’s original proposal for the Reichstag was a much larger structure. A giant roof soared right across the top of what was left of the original building in a kind of exorcism of Germany’s tortured past. It was too expensive and he was asked for something smaller and a lot cheaper. There was also a demand for a symbolic memory of the dome that been destroyed by the war.

SKETCHES OF ORIGINAL DOME AND NORMANS SKETCH OF THE NEW DESIGN

NORMAN I remember saying: There is no way I’m going to be a party to recreating a symbol that was of the emperor past which was a symbol of authoritarian, you know, the Kaiser would call government as and when he felt it was necessary. And instead what we proposed was something that would work with the ecology of the building, would work with the winds, scoop air, would actually draw sun in, would actually have a shade and would also celebrate a kind of processional route to the summit to the many visitors who would come to the cupola.

DEYAN The question for Foster is do you restore the damage? Do you take what’s left of the old building and make it look new again? Or do you show what’s happened to that building? Do you show its history? Do you keep the Russian soldiers’ sometimes-obscene messages written on the stone? In Foster’s view, of course you do, this is part of German history. You can’t wipe these things out.

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18. NORMAN ON THE INSIDE, HIS WORK ON THE OUTSIDE VINCY – NORMAN & EDUARDO PREPARE THE MODEL STEAMBOAT

EDUARDO Daddy! NORMAN Yeah?… Yeah but we need hmm yeah… Is this really hot water? EDUARDO It’s actually very very hot? NORMAN Let’s see… EDUARDO Because I let it, like… three minutes going. NORMAN Really? So you think it’s pretty hot. EDUARDO Yeah. Because I let it, like, three minutes going. And take the glass. NORMAN All right. Ok can you put into here? EDUARDO The water? NORMAN Yeah EDUARDO All? For what is this? NORMAN For the boiler. EDUARDO To put this out?

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NORMAN It’s full. I think we can say categorically, it’s more than full. EDUARDO Put this in down here? NORMAN Oh no we need put some fuel in. EDUARDO And what this? NORMAN It says the maximum 3 pieces. I’m starting to smell it. I hope it doesn’t explode in our face. EDUARDO Why does it catch? How can it explode? NORMAN Little bit of experimentation is needed here. It’s getting hot. You can start smelling it. EDUARDO Is it the oil? NORMAN No, it’s water. Hey, it’s doing well there. EDUARDO What was that? Away, let’s go. Yeah! Mummy! NORMAN Yeah, let me build up some steam because it will do the whistle. Can you take it? It’s fantastic. Look at that.

THE SCENE ENDS WITH A WIDE SHOT OF THE BOAT MOVING FORWARD IN THE POOL. MUSIC FADES UP AND WE CUT TO: A SERIES OF ABSTRACT MODELS OF FORMS

DEYAN Ever since he was a child, Norman’s been fascinated by models. He makes them. He collects them. In his house he has shelf after shelf with exquisitely crafted models aircraft

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and cars. And even as architecture becomes a more and more a digital design process, they’re a key part of his practice.

NIGEL DANCEY 54:14

As the computer started coming into the office, and obviously everybody is working on computers now, you started to wonder whether the model shop would have a future. And you would have same people at the model shop, you kind of wondered how you would use models. And what’s interesting, although we can do incredibly convincing computer renderings of what spaces might be like, we’re finding we are using more models than ever before.

WE SEE A MODEL OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM DEYAN Models provide a physical, three-dimensional crystallization of a design. They provide a tangible step in the process of making an idea into reality. They serve as prototypes and tests. For Norman, it’s not simply about seeing how a building will look. It’s a means of understanding what a full architectural experience will be.

SHOTS OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM, TRAFALGAR SQUARE, STANSTED, MIXED WITH DETAILS OF SKETCHES

NORMAN I believe that the infrastructure of spaces, connections, the public domain, the kind of urban glue that binds the buildings together is more important than any one building.

SKETCHES OF STANSTED

NORMAN Also, perhaps, trying to reinvent concepts like an airport in such a way in which the experience of an airport will be uplifting where, really, an airport has gotten to the point where, in terms of the combination of crowds and security and so on, that it’s a kind of reviled building type.

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19. AIRPORTS – STANSTED – HONG KONG – BEIJING VIDEO OF STANSTED

DEYAN If Hong Kong marked a point of departure in the evolution of the skyscraper, Stansted began a new phase in airport design. At Stansted, the terminal was turned upside down, burying the machinery underground, a move that transformed the rooftop into a giant umbrella, liberating travelers from the claustrophobic labyrinth of the traditional departure lounge.

CHEP LAP KOK DEYAN The Stansted breakthrough took a step further with the more refined Chep Lap Kok airport in Hong Kong. In China’s Olympic year, Foster’s approach to airport design whent even further with Beijing’s new terminal three.

MOUZHAN AND NORMAN WALK UP TO THE BEIJING T3 TERMINAL MOUZHAN I think this place is going to become like a viewing platform. NORMAN Well, well, well.

MOUZHAN You can see the entire building, look all of it. NORMAN For the first time... MOUZHAN You can actually see the aircraft there, people getting off, getting on... NORMAN Incredible.

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MOUZHAN And then here you would just see 40 aircraft on this side, all lined up. You can see the whole... NORMAN We finally got the diagram.

WE SEE THE INTERIOR OF BEIJING’S T3

DEYAN The airport is the modern city gate: a symbolic national front door, reflecting the aspirations of a culture. But negotiating the terminal is a stressful, anxious experience for most passengers. Much airport architecture just adds to the confusion. A good airport is one that is easy to understand, one that allows you to move through it without having to ask for directions, or look for signs. It celebrates travel, rather than makes the journey an ordeal. If you see an aircraft, the runway, and the sky beyond, you have a natural orientation.

CAI GUO QIANG 57:52

It is a privilege to have that airport in Beijing. It is the best I’ve ever seen, When I go through, I look up and the natural light fills the space and I find that often times there is no need for artificial light. It’s an enclosed building but it’s very soft and comfortable and the natural light makes you feel as if you’re outdoors. As an artist, that’s something that really touches me.

DEYAN China wanted a building that would make a strong statement about their country’s new place in the world. It’s the largest building on the planet . Its architectural language is both contemporary, and rooted in China’s culture.

LORETTA LAW 59:00

The geometry of the roof is like an analogy of like a crouching, lying dragon. It’s very modest looking but once you get inside it’s completely overwhelming, completely the opposite of the space that you would imagine.

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DEYAN Building Beijing’s new airport in just four years was an astonishing achievement, only made possible by a highly organized, 50.000 strong work force. They lived on the site, working three non-stop shifts, round-the-clock. At one point there were 100 tower cranes on the site.

MOUZHAN 59:36

I remember doing the competitions for the terminal 5 at Heathrow. And we didn’t win. A year and a half later, we did the competition or Chep Lap Kok in Hong Kong. We won that competition. I went out, we built the buildings. The building operated for seven years before terminal five at Heathrow opened. So, that’s how long things take in UK.

NORMAN

We now have a tremendous amount to learn from the best of those emerging economies and the way in which they are thinking big, thinking strategically, taking bold initiatives. The examples are, in a way, almost so obvious, you just wonder why it takes so long for the penny to drop.

20. CITIES SHOTS OF THE STUDIO AT BATTERSEA

DEYAN Building huge, complex projects under the most difficult circumstances is an achievement that has not come without a cost. When Norman started, an office of 25 people was considered big. Before the credit crunch, Foster and Partners reached 1400. His critics say that being big might make for more good buildings, but not so many brilliant ones.

ANOTHER ANGLE—THE CAMERA MOVING THROUGH THE OFFICE

DEYAN For Foster a big office is a tool. It gives him the resources to play a part in the key issue facing an architect today: shaping the future of the

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city. For the first time in history, the planet has become majority urban. And the challenge for an ambitious architect is to go on being relevant in the face of such massive change. Working at the scale of the individual building doesn’t seem enough to make a difference.

SHOTS OF HONG KONG, THE OCEAN, A FISHERMAN, AND THE SKYLINE STEFAN 1:01:28

Man for thousands of years has actually lived in harmony with nature. It is just the last hundred years or 150 years that we have this incredible urbanization taking place. The farmer was very happy. He would be working on his field, he would produce the food and feed his family, a very sustainable cycle. If all farmers move to the city, then you have a problem.

RICKY BURDETT 1:01:47

And why? Why is this happening? Because this guy will make three times as much by selling peanuts at a traffic light than he would working in the field in some remote district. And that’s why the landscape of many of the cities that we’ve been studying show so much of this informal, street vendors, people who have to adapt and respond.

STEFAN 1:02:27

And the problem is how you feed all these people, and how you feed them with energy, with food, gas, electricity, the way they move around in their cars, in a sustainable way.

STEFAN BEHLING AT THE IVORYPRESS CONFERENCE STEFAN We all have dreams, and they come from television programs, you know, nice people, pool, happy children, lawn, driveway. If this is what you want, this is what you’re going to get.

DEYAN In the west, the industrial revolution took 200 years. In China, this change will take place in just a few decades. So architects must not only

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help plan cities that address the way that mankind is making the planet uninhabitable; they need to do it quickly.

21. MASDAR

DEYAN Masdar City in Abu Dhabi is an attempt to show how that might be done. In the 50 degree desert heat, it’s a hugely ambitious plan for a carbon neutral city of 100.000 people.

JURGEN HAPP 1:03:15

It is actually the idea of creating a Silicon Valley of clean tech. As in Silicon Valley the seed is a university where you get the new knowledge, the new research. And then, companies settle around and benefit from the research.

DEYAN Masdar will combine homes with jobs. It will generate its own power, and treat its own waste. The materials and methods used in construction aim to maximize recycling, and minimize carbon footprints. At first glance, the project seems like something from a science-fiction comic Norman read as a boy. But much of it is based on some very traditional ideas that were abandoned or forgotten with the advent of cheap fossil fuels. Movement in the city will rely on a network of driverless electric vehicles, guided by invisible sensors, running across the city at ground level, while pedestrians circulate on a deck above.

GERARD 1:04:17

If vehicles are going to become more efficient and driverless, and they’re going follow networks and be programmable, then you have to separate them from the human because the human is unpredictable. That’s why the city is lifted. That’s going to be revolutionary for transportation.

DAVID NELSON 1:04:38

To put 15 billion dollars into focusing on a center or renewable technologies, and to

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spend oil money, which is there now, on it with the foresight thinking 20 or 30 years down the line is unbelievable. Why aren’t we doing that?

DEYAN

Will Masdar be the first carbon neutral city in the world? We don’t know yet. If it works, it’s a huge achievement; if it fails, it’s a heroic failure.

NORMAN AT THE IVORYPRESS CONFERENCE IN MADRID

NORMAN 1:05:21

If we achieve a zero waste, zero carbon, then that will be a kind of miracle. The tragedy is that given the urgency of the situation, given what is at stake, which is literally our survival as a species, the thing that I find inexplicable is that there is only one Masdar. You know, if there were twenty urban experiments in terms of twenty cities happening around the planet now, one would be very, very critical and say: Why only twenty? That is the shocking thing. That is unbelievable... The big issues in terms of coupling all this together can only be a political initiative. And I think that probably you’ll have to get almost to the point of desperation before everybody is forced to get their act together. And then the agonizing question will be: Did everybody wake up in time, or did they wake up too late?

22. NORMAN, THE CRITICS & HEALTH A SERIES OF PHOTOS OF NORMAN

DEYAN Norman’s earlier career was a honeymoon, a love affair with the critics because he produced work which was photogenic, very fresh, very successful. And then of course there always comes a moment when someone has to say well just a minute, “Haven’t we seen this before? Is this becoming over exposed? Maybe he’s treading water. Maybe this is becoming self-parody. Maybe a world end to end covered in Fosterism is not such a great idea...”

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NORMAN It’s not what you read in the press. It’s not about an award. It’s not about somebody saying well done. Sometimes somebody will say nice things about something you’ve done and, in truth, you don’t really think you deserve it. Other times you don’t win a competition or you get a bad review but you know yourself if you’ve done justice to it, it really doesn’t matter. Of course we all love praise so we’re all vulnerable in that sense. We’re all human.

NORMAN OUT ON THE SKI SLOPES

DEYAN What on earth is a man in his seventies doing pushing himself to the extremes of the cross-country marathon? It’s painful to do it. Once, he was wearing the wrong kind of gloves and he got frostbite. It took him six months to recover but he did it again the year after, and the year after that. It hurts. It’s also a very isolated thing to do. Yes— you’re surrounded by all the other people in the marathon— but you are alone in the physical determination. You have to finish. NORMAN I suppose that I’ve, until relatively recently, been immune from illness so the idea of a hospital, of drugs, of an operation was an alien concept. Ten years ago I was diagnosed with cancer. That was pretty horrific, that was probably the worst moment of my life, one of the worst. I remember struggling through the idea, struggling through the forty-eight hours before I was rushed to hospital. I remember being told at the time that I was fortunate because it could have been a heart attack. Little was I to know that two years later I’d have a heart attack. And the thing that perhaps was important to me was the idea that at the end of that six months, I would still be able to train for the cross-country ski marathon. And I was told by the doctor forget it, you’ll never do it in six months, you’ll have relapses, it’ll take longer. The reality was that I did it to the day in six

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months, so I think that in some ways a stage of denial is perhaps at times helpful. Having survived the operation, the chemotherapy, I remember the marathon and then shortly after that I had a check. And I remember coming back in a car from the airport and wondering why the doctor hadn’t called to give the results of the check, so I called the doctor. We stopped the car. I got out. And he said I’ve got bad news for you and I remember saying what does that means, tell me the truth. And he said you’ve got maximum three months to live. That I think was the worst moment ever.

DEYAN Like so many other challenges, Norman came through that health crisis. The constant thing about Norman is that he will not stop. He will not let himself get beaten down by things. He will always pick himself up, he will always start again, and there is always another turn in the Foster story.

NORMAN Everything is a fresh start. I mean I’d love to do every project that I’ve ever looked at and have a second bite at it because you can always go one step further. And if you can’t go one step further, then it means that you haven’t learned from what you’ve done before and you’re not sharp. Then it’s time to say stop and do something else.

FADE TO BLACK. CREDITS.