Lord Norman Foster: ‘We should be growing the green belt, not eroding it'

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Reaching 90 can put those lucky enough to do so into a mellow mood, keen on looking back over their long lives. But not Norman Foster, or Lord Foster of Thames Bank as he has been since 1999, the world's best-known architect and a global 'starchitect' for the past half century, who reached the landmark last Sunday.
'I haven't really had time to think about it. I was in Madrid two weeks ago, New York last week, Rome in between, and now I'm here in London.' All for work, he makes clear, except for the few days in Rome where his daughter Paola is studying (architecture – she is the one among his five children who is following in his footsteps). With his third wife Elena Ochoa Foster, 66, a Spanish art curator, psychologist and TV presenter whom he married in 1996, the family gathered in the Italian capital for a low-key dinner.
Not a big event, then? 'No,' and he chuckles, almost bashfully. 'It just creeps up on you.' And, anyway, his eyes are fixed firmly forward.
So much so that he brooks no talk of slowing down in a working life that saw him found Foster + Partners in 1967 with a handful of colleagues, and build it into an international business, with 2,500 employees in 18 offices spread across 12 countries around the world. Though he is no longer the majority shareholder – that passed in 2021 to a Canadian private investment company, Hennich & Co – he remains in a day-to-day sense, very much at the helm.
To his long list of credits – from the Gherkin and the 'blade of light' Millennium Bridge in the City of London, to the redesigned Reichstag in Berlin following Germany's reunification, the Bilbao Metro in Spain and the Apple Park Campus in California – he is fully occupied adding more: a new global headquarters for JP Morgan in New York; a redevelopment of part of the Prado Gallery in Madrid; the Zayed National Museum in the UAE; and – close to his heart as a Mancunian by birth – a new 100,000-seat Manchester United stadium that will be the largest in the UK.
Is he a football fan? 'No,' he replies, 'but if I am working out in the gym, I tune in to the football. And I saw some incredible matches at Wembley [Stadium – which he designed].
Later this month, Foster is expecting to hear if he will be chosen from a short-list of five to design the new Queen Elizabeth II Memorial, another passion project. But they all are, to judge by his schedule. 'I started work at six this morning. I'll probably finish in time for dinner at 8.30 this evening.'
No compromises with age? 'No, why should I?'
Why indeed? Foster – who cycles and does cross-country skiing if he has any spare time – is looking remarkably well as he sits opposite me at a round table in his firm's London headquarters on the river in Battersea. If I didn't know and he said he was 60, I wouldn't blink. Sporting his trademark black polo neck, it is set off by a well-cut cream suit, brown loafers and vivid yellow socks.
But age isn't about how you look. It's how engaged your brain is and Foster is sharp as a pin, and unafraid of courting controversy in his conversation. As when he turns to the future of the green belt, which is currently on his mind.
'I am a passionate advocate for the green belt. I think it is one of our greatest inventions. And it has become a political football.'
Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner, in charge of building the 1.5 million new homes Labour promised in its election manifesto, has announced that she will be chipping away at the green belt, picking off what she calls 'grey and ugly areas' within it. Foster is implacably opposed. 'It shouldn't be eroded. If anything it should be growing.'
Fellow Mancunian Rayner's intention to simplify the planning process to remove what are referred to as 'obstacles to growth' impresses him even less. 'We need planning more than ever before. With planning you can create neighbourhoods which are walkable, which are compact. The mantra should be avoiding sprawl like Los Angeles.'
Such compact cities like London, Paris, New York are better places to live, he says. They have a lower carbon footprint – 'I'm not inventing this. It's in the data' – and they extend our lives. Take it from one who clearly knows.
'In a compact city, you walk rather than drive which is healthier so you live longer. One of the killers is loneliness. In a compact neighbourly city, you are less likely to be alienated and alone.'
He is on a roll. 'And the compact city, because it doesn't sprawl, is saving the countryside and protecting bio-diversity.'
Compact cities rely on strong planning controls, but they also usually feature tower blocks. Half of Londoners now believe that there are too many towers on their city's skyline, some of them designed by Foster himself. Others complain that other developments are 'mono-cultural' ghettos for the wealthy.
High-rise towers doesn't inevitably mean bad, he replies, and points to the example of Manhattan in the centre of New York: it has some of the lowest emissions in America, is walkable, has food, public transport and a sense of community.
But he does accept there are particular problems in London. 'It suffers from fragmentation of its different boroughs,' he agrees, 'and the absence of any overriding master planning, where you can get the benefits of change from one quarter of the city to another.' He worries that too many older buildings, those that give a place character and texture, are being torn down.
'The ultimate sustainable building is the one that is recyclable, rather than destroying it and building afresh. That doesn't mean to say that you save everything because it is old. Obviously there are value judgments about the quality of heritage.'
Foster's own heritage is northern and working-class. An only child, he was born in Reddish, on the south side of Manchester, and brought up in a typical redbrick terraced house next to a railway line. He has described how the passing steam trains would rattle his bedroom window.
His father was a labourer, who later managed a pawn shop, and his mother a waitress. He credits them for his seemingly inexhaustible work ethic and regrets that they didn't live long enough to see even one of his buildings completed.
'I inherited my work ethic from them. There is no question.' There is still just a hint of Manchester in his exceptionally soft-spoken voice. 'They were just extraordinarily hard-working. It was never 'poor me, I am working hard'. That was life and, in a way, I've never thought about it. Hard work is normal.'
They worked to keep a roof over their heads. Estimates of Foster's wealth vary, from £15 billion if his remaining stake in his practice is included to a private fortune of £177 million and he is often labelled 'the richest architect in the world'. He has not one but four roofs over his head – in London, Madrid, Switzerland (an eighteenth-century chateau) and a country estate in Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts, which the previous owner used to rent to the Obamas for their family summer vacations from the White House.
'Work is for many people about survival, you are right. And when I was growing up that was true of my parents, but my mother only took a job waiting in a café once my father had retired and they were – relatively – comfortably off. Nonetheless she felt the need to be working.'
He feels justified therefore in drawing a parallel between her choice – she did it, he suggests, because she was 'gregarious and liked being with people' – and his own to carry on at 90 out of choice, not necessity. 'It is life repeating itself. I choose to do the same thing she did.'
Theirs was clearly a happy and loving home – his parents had a good marriage, he stresses – but he left school at 16 and worked in various roles in local government because he couldn't get a grant to go to university. At 21, though, he found a way himself to get on the architecture course at Manchester University, working variously in a bakery, as a bouncer and driving an ice-cream van to stay afloat. And did he thrive.
In the early 1960s, he went to Yale to do a Masters, where he met Richard Rogers, his great friend, rival and fellow leading light in bringing modernism to British architecture in the 1970s and 1980s. Initially they set up in practice together with their first commission to build a garden house in Cornwall for Rogers' then in-laws. Their fee was £500.
In 1967, they went their own ways. Foster is a leader, as the name he chose for the new firm reflects. 'But it is Foster + Partners.' Yes, and he is the only partner named.
Another member of that first shared practice was Wendy Cheesman, whom Foster married in 1964. They had four sons, two of them adopted. In 1989, Wendy died of cancer. There was a brief second marriage to Sabiha Malik which ended in divorce before he met Elena Ochoa, with whom he has two children, a girl and a boy.
For all his glowing good health today, he has had his own health issues. In 1999 he was diagnosed with bowel cancer. 'They said something like, 'it could have been worse. It could have been a heart attack', and then three years later I had the heart attack.'
He came through and it left its mark on his work. 'Since then I've been personally involved with our Maggie's Centre for those with cancer in Manchester [opened in 2016] and I have to say I wish that when I had cancer that there was a Maggie's to give me perspective.'
By the time of Wendy's death, Foster + Partners was thriving nationally. His first celebrated building was an office for an insurance firm in Ipswich in 1975.
'We humans are social creatures and we do like to come together, so it had a swimming pool, roof gardens. It was about work but it was also about a lifestyle.'
The current trend, especially since Covid, for Work From Home intrigues Foster, but he is adamant that it will not cause the death of the big office block, so much a feature of his portfolio. 'The idea is that the workplace is somewhere you want to go, to be with others, to be social. To claim it is dead is a denial of the very essence of humanity.'
With the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank building that Foster completed in 1986 in what was then still a British colony, his practice signalled its international expansion. It was, his peers have subsequently remarked, ahead of the curve in going global, setting an example that others now routinely follow.
Foster smiles boyishly and laughs when I mention the accolade. 'Well, this isn't unflattering,' he responds grinning, and then – as is his habit – immediately begins detailing the design and building stages. His memory is phenomenal.
'The building was pre-fabbed. Modular construction. That was a first in some ways. Mitsubishi made the bathrooms as container sized elements, packaged right down to towels, and I spent time in Japan engaged in that. And the steel was from the UK. So I suppose it was truly a global project.
But the global tag is also about him being such a name in architecture that his practice can run paying little attention to national borders. 'Our first overseas office happened earlier. It must have been 1970 in Oslo.'
He describes two main projects that resulted in Norway in the years that followed... 'One was in Vestby for Fred Olsen Lines. 'It was in a forest because it was very much about integrating [office] pavilions in nature by recycling natural light, ventilation – all of these. And the other was totally about solar power and recycling.'
The green curve is another area where he was ahead of the field, but nowadays is facing criticism. In 2020, he resigned from a 1000-strong UK climate coalition, Architects Declare, because of criticism of his work on building airports – which all the attendant fossil fuel emissions – from Saudi Arabia to Beijing.
'We cannot wind the clock back. Ours is a mobile society.'
One solution he favours is a bigger role for nuclear power – 'the safest, most ecologically supportive form of energy. Nobody has even died from nuclear waste. And yet people are dying each year from the waste caused by fossil fuels, a lot of them kids.'
But nuclear power is not popular with voters. 'Look at the data,' he comes back, not raising his voice, but his steel evident. 'Take emotion out of it. The figures are published.'
He refers me to an editorial he wrote as a guest editor in November 2024 in a special edition of the architectural magazine Domus. 'I likened the current lemming-like rush for wind turbines, solar panels and electric vehicles in the quest to save the planet to Graham Greene's leper in his novel A Burnt-Out Case. The leper is finally pronounced cured only when his arms and legs have been amputated.'
Strong language, suggesting he is not a fan of wind turbines? 'We [his practice] have been party to revolutionalising wind turbines in the past, reducing the noise and the maintenance and so on, and we have pioneered work with solar panels. But there is a certain point when you have to have a sense of balance and priorities'
And what that balancing tells him is that wind turbines may be 'destroying nature'. Likewise solar cells 'have a 20-year life and we haven't worked out how to recycle them yet. This is a wider conversation.'
He likes details and joined-up thinking and applies that also to electric cars. 'If a large proportion of the electricity at the moment that is generated is generated by fossil fuels, that means when you are squirting electricity into the battery (which is like the fuel tank) of your electric car, that electricity is being produced by a dirty fossil fuel source. It is then a dirty car.'
He is not, he insists, a sceptic. 'I am not campaigning against renewables. Quite the reverse. But there has to be a balance.'
And that search for balance prompts him also to cast a rational eye over other governments' plans in regard to power generation and climate change. 'It doesn't make sense for Germany or Spain to be shutting down nuclear which is tried, tested and safe and clean. Instead they are buying electricity from France that is nuclear powered. It is making decisions on irrational data.'
His interest extends into other contested fields. 'Why,' he asks, 'would you have a Department of Levelling-Up in government, and then the same government cancels the HS2 connection between Birmingham and Manchester [as Rishi Sunak did in October 2023].'
It flies in the face of the reason, he insists. 'If you are really interested in sustainability, you build railways not roads. And we know that connectivity brings benefits, but not in getting from one place to another quickly. If you invest in HS2, you take the pressure off the regional lines [in the north] so you have better connectivity locally.'
People may disagree, but Norman Foster is clearly in no mood to take a back seat in such important national discussions on the grounds of his age. Or to restrict himself to an oversight role at his practice.
Propped up near to where we are sitting are boards laying out the plans Foster + Partners have submitted for the official national memorial to Queen Elizabeth II in and around the Mall. He springs us with the ease of someone 50 years his junior to bring them over to the table to show me.
Is it really possible to capture the spirit of a monarch who reigned for 70 years in a memorial? 'I was very privileged as an Order of Merit [since 1997] to meet Queen Elizabeth. I really thought she was a remarkable individual so I have a very personal interest and passion about a memorial to her. I have tried to find a link between what I saw in the Order of Merit receptions of the informality of Her Majesty, and her formality in so many public occasions'.
His plans draw on John Nash, the Regency architect responsible for Buckingham Palace and St James Park, 'a master planner' who combined formality in the Mall and informality in the park views and landscapes around it. 'The naturalistic garden,' enthuses Foster, 'is a totally British invention and we want to rediscover that.'
The verdict on the five competing schemes is due this month. I wonder aloud if Foster's past brushes with Prince, now King, Charles over architectural matters may have dented his chances. In 2009 he was one of a number of architects who signed a letter criticising Charles for using his 'privileged position' to block a modernist redevelopment of the old Chelsea Barracks in London.
'I think that style has the potential to mislead. Design at its core is not about this or that style. It is much more about values. [The king's] heart is really in the right place, he is concerned about the right values, but perhaps there is from time to time an element of confusion about those values, that if you follow those values it has to be this style or that style and I don't think it is.'
The reality, he adds, is that the two of them share much common ground. 'It may not appear so from the outside, but in many ways we are championing the same virtues and values and objectives.'
He seems, belatedly, at the grand old age of 90, to be embracing the diplomatic arts.
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