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On June 1st, 1935, in Reddish, England, Norman Foster was born. He was raised in a working-class neighborhood as an only child with a declared interest in architecture and structures. He dropped out of school at 16 to work as a town hall clerk, and he later spent two years working in engineering as a member of the Royal Air Force. He continued on to study architecture at the University of Manchester, where he received praise for his drawings and discovered a passion for sketching that would last a lifetime. He eventually received a scholarship to Yale University’s School of Architecture, where he graduated in 1962 with a master’s degree.
Foster wed his first wife and business partner Wendy in 1964. She died from cancer in 1989, and Foster went on to marry Sabiha Rumani Malik in 1991. The two divorced in 1995, and Foster married his third and current wife, professor and publisher Elena Ochoa, in 1996. He has several children.
In the early 1970s, Foster had his big break with the design of the Willis Faber & Dumas headquarters in Ipswich, a low-rise office building that was innovative for its use of escalators, contoured facades and idyllic, nature-oriented interiors. The late ‘70s and early-to-mid-‘80s saw Foster and his team working on the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation headquarters, a modern three-tower edifice, while the ‘90s saw the architect heading up an update of the Reichstag in Berlin, rebuilding the emblematic glass dome after the unification of East and West Germany. In the early 2000s, Foster also contributed to the iconic New York City skyline with his design of the Hearst Tower, a 44-story skyscraper with a triangulated facade atop an Art Deco foundation.
Foster + Partners is a global organization with more than 1,000 workers that manages projects in numerous countries with enormous expenditures. The hands-on draftsman that Foster once was has evolved into more of a global manager who wants to free up as much time as possible for designing. Foster was given a life peerage nine years after being knighted in 1990. In addition to these awards, he also holds the 1999 Pritzker Prize and the 1983 Royal Gold Medal for Architecture.
Foster underwent chemotherapy treatments after receiving a colon cancer diagnosis in his 60s. Another one of his loves, solo flying, has been considerably limited by a heart attack he also experienced.
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