Norman Foster
Norman Foster
Norman Robert Foster, Baron Foster of Thames Bank of Reddish, OM, HonFREngis a British architect whose company, Foster + Partners, maintains an international design practice famous for high-tech architecture...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionDirector
Date of Birth13 December 1903
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Surveys often show people would prefer a detached house with a lawn and driveway to an apartment. I understand this. It's not my place to presume to tell people where they can live. But perhaps that dream will simply not be possible in the future.
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A life-threatening illness or two certainly gives you an awareness of your own mortality. It heightens your sense of gratitude for things that previously, if you've not taken them for granted, you perhaps never appreciated how precious they were. That's almost a platitude, but one has to state the obvious.
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The only honourable work my parents knew was blue-collar. But while my father Robert ran a pawnbroker's shop, and my mother was a waitress, I moved into a middle-class world with a level of security they never knew.
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We now think it hilarious that medieval streets were used as open sewers. Equally, our descendants will say: 'You won't believe this, but people were once allowed to hurl a couple of tons of dangerous metal around smashing into each other.'
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I love flying; I love aircraft, and you could say I've had a love affair with flight since I was a child. I travel a huge amount. I use airports, and as a pilot, I've flown in and out of airports thousands of times, so really, I have a fairly broad perspective.
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The Italians have long known what makes a livable town or city.
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You can find, occasionally, some absolutely fantastic things in hunting shops. I've got one jacket that I just happened across which is a kind of unwashed leather - completely anonymous but absolutely special.
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Joseph Bazalgette created a sewer system which he originally sized for London's needs of the time - he then doubled it to anticipate the future beyond. These are the qualities that I admire.
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When the Great Fire of London destroyed most of the medieval city in 1666, Christopher Wren was invited to design a new one. Within days, he had drawn up an elegant grid of broad boulevards leading to majestic squares, but it came to nothing - the existing landowners wanted things as they had been.
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I think cars encapsulate the history of innovation and style - it's the other side of the coin of the car being public enemy No.1.
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Anything that reduces fuel consumption and cuts down on greenhouse gasses is good news.
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There are those airports which make you feel better, and there are those airports that, when you go there, your heart sinks: you can't wait to get out of there. They both function as airports, but it's the things that you can't measure that make them different.
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Everything we design is a response to the specific climate and culture of a particular place.
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I travel continuously, and I see many cities, but there is nowhere like London.