Sir Norman Foster, 88, is one of the world’s leading architects. His works include Apple’s headquarters in Silicon Valley, the Gherkin in London and the Sage music centre in Gateshead. His Norman Foster Foundation, based in Madrid, aims to “help new generations of architects, designers and urbanists to anticipate the future”. A major retrospective of his work is currently on show in the Pompidou Centre in Paris, and Norman Foster: Complete Works 1965-Today has just been published.
Your exhibition is the largest that the Pompidou Centre has ever held on architecture. The new book is more than 1,000 pages over two volumes. Is the aim to make a definitive statement of your work?
First of all they were both invitations. It’s great that the Pompidou was prepared to devote so much space to the subject of architecture. So it was an opportunity to raise awareness of architecture and the infrastructure of cities. And to give insights into the creative processes beneath the surface – to show that something that looks very simple, like the circular building we did for Apple, has come out of studying many options.
There’s a drawing in the book that you did as a student, that shows the workings of a wooden windmill in meticulous detail. What is its significance to you?
I was always curious about how something works, in the case of the windmill the inner workings, the cogs, how the wind power was transmitted eventually to the stones that would grind the grain. I think that that comes round to how do you find a basis for design. It’s not just how the materials work but – whether it’s a museum or a corporate entity – what are the values, what makes it tick below the surface. How can that be reflected in the architecture? How can the architecture enable it to work better?
What was it like to work with Steve Jobs on the Apple headquarters in Silicon Valley?
Steve had that rare ability to think across a great scale. To be at one point on his hands and knees and worrying about an outlet socket, at the other end thinking ahead for his enterprise. With the design of that building we were trying to achieve harmony of inside and out, that synchronisation of internal and external geometry which suddenly clicked and became a eureka moment.
Did you learn things from him?
It was more like a reaffirmation, working together. We did a series of full-size prototypes looking at 12 different types of white glass, looking to see which one was the whitest of the white, so I think it was a shared quest for doing the best building that we were capable of doing together.
Your book has drawings of the 75 different flying machines – gliders, biplanes, jets – that you have piloted. What does flying mean for you?
First the romance. You may know the mechanics of flight but that doesn’t really explain the magic of a heavy machine levitating into the sky, that moment of breaking free from gravity. And then it would be the aerial perspective that gives you the insight into the spaces that you know, the traditional streets and squares, the mindless sprawl, the sheer beauty of nature.
Is there anything that you haven’t flown yet, but would like to?
I suppose in another life it would have been exciting to fly the ultimate high-performance machines, which are of course fighters.
There is a chapter of your book called Alpine. You ski and you have a home in St Moritz. As a boy you used to cycle from Manchester to the Lake District. What do you love about mountains?
The sheer majesty, the grandeur, the scale, the quality of light. It’s the drama, the extreme contrasts, and the physical engagement, whether that is through cross-country skiing or a gravel bike or a mountain bike or a road bike.
Do you feel most at home in the mountains, in St Moritz?
Home in many ways is where I am. When I’m here in London I really feel at home and I think the same is true when I’m in Madrid. But if I’m in the Alps that’s where most of my books are, it is where I have a drawing set up and I can come back and resume it.
Are these books on architecture, art, philosophy…?
A total mixture: they can be on camouflage, on streamlining, on cities. I’m just putting together a selection of books that I’m having sent out for the summer because I will spend the next few weeks based in America. I move around to the west coast, to Texas. It’s a ritual we do every summer.
Which book would you take with you if your house was burning down?
Impossible to answer. The ones that I’m bringing together now are very much statistical, about how successively the future is always better than the past. On energy I find Vaclav Smil fascinating. Steven Pinker, whose Enlightenment Now looks at the progress of civilisation – why we are more civilised now than we were in the past despite a lot of media of the moment that would suggest otherwise.
Obviously there’s a lot of pessimism about climate especially, but you don’t share that?
I share the concern and the sense of urgency. But it seems to me, although this as a statement creates an element of derision, that we need an abundance of clean energy. We know statistically that the cleanest form of energy is nuclear. That is within easy reach. And we know that we can create jet fuel out of sea water and decarbonise the ocean at the same time.
You grew up in a great manufacturing city, Manchester, which by then was in decline. In your book you reproduce a painting of the region by LS Lowry. What do you see when you look at a Lowry – something depressing?
No not at all. My wife gave me as a birthday present a very early Lowry from 1935 and it’s almost like the agenda of what he did later in his life. I think there’s an extraordinary humanity in those neighbourhoods, in those streets. Maybe I’m romanticising but I think of the work ethic in the north. I think about values. I came out of a background of hardworking parents.
Norman Foster: Complete Works 1965-Today is published by Taschen