Norman Foster
A Life in Architecture
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
A biography of Lord Foster, one of the world's foremost architects, written with his full co-operation.
Norman Foster is a phenomenon - as an architect, but also as an individual. He is responsible for a dozen or more of the most recognisable buildings of the last thirty years. Under his driven leadership, what is now called Foster and Partners has grown to an international firm with almost 1,000 employees, building astonishing constructions all over the world.
Deyan Sudjic explores the nature of the impact that he has had on architecture, and on the contemporary city. It traces his remarkable journey from the backstreets of Manchester, the determination with which he has built a global architectural practice, and his huge creative impact on what we see around us.
Amongst many other buildings, Norman Foster is responsible for the design of Beijing's new airport, one of the world's largest, for the Rossiya tower in Moscow, in contention to be the tallest skyscraper in Europe until the credit crunch killed it, for one of the towers at Ground Zero in Manhattan, and for a crop of new towers in London. He designed the Reichstag, the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banks headquarters in London and China, the new Wembley stadium and the British Museum's new court.
Deyan Sudjic's insightful and elegantly written biography charts the remarkable life of one of the world's most influential architectural figures.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Though Sudjic (The Language of Things) takes readers on an engrossing tour of Foster's life as a renowned architect, it's the exquisite attention to detail in recounting that life particularly the childhood that brings this book to such vibrant life. Foster came from humble means; growing up in England's Crescent Grove "unmistakably on the wrong side of the tracks" left a lasting impression on Foster. His working class parents "had failed in what they wanted to do with their lives," Foster believed. Following his education at Manchester, he turned down a Fulbright scholarship because he didn't think it offered the "flexibility to work" and instead pursued the Henry Fellowship, which led him to study architecture at Yale. In the United States Foster was thrilled to "reinvent himself." Sudjic, director of London's Design Museum, does a remarkable job examining influences, Buckminster Fuller among them, who "gave Foster the ambition about what architecture might be" and deftly describes the irony of Foster's fame as the architect of influential buildings like the Hong Kong Bank which, though it elevated Foster to international acclaim, came at such great expense that it did little to make him more employable. Photos.
