NORMAN FOSTER

Norman Robert Foster, Lord Foster of Thames Bank,

OM Kt. (born 1 June 1935) is an English architect whose company maintains
an international design practice, Foster + Partners.

Foster was raised in Manchester in a

working-class family and was intrigued by design
and engineering from a young age. His years
observing Mancunian architecture subsequently
influenced his works, and was inspired to pursue
a career in architecture after a treasurer clerk
noticed his sketches and interest in Manchester's
buildings while he worked at Manchester Town
Hall.
 Foster gained an internship at a local architect's
office before submitting a portfolio and winning a place at the
University of Manchester School of Architecture. He subsequently won
a scholarship to study at the Yale School of Architecture in the United
States of America.

Foster returned to the United Kingdom in 1963

and set up a practice, Team 4. Three years later, he founded Foster &
Associates with his wife Wendy, which became Foster + Partners. His
breakthrough building was arguably the Willis Building in Ipswich in
1975 and he has since designed landmark structures such as
Wembley Stadium and 30 St Mary Axe. He is one of Britain's most
prolific architects of his generation. In 1999 he was awarded the
Pritzker Architecture Prize, often referred to as the Nobel Prize of
architecture. In 2009 Foster was awarded the Prince of Asturias Award
in the Arts category. In 1994 he received the AIA Gold Medal.
 Foster's parents were diligent, hard
workers - so diligent that Foster, as an only child, felt their heavy workload
restricted his relationship with them and he was often looked after by
neighbours or other family members. He attended Grammar School in
Burnage. He said he always felt 'different' at school and was bullied. He
retired into the world of books and was quiet and awkward in his early
years making faux pas.
Manchester was 'one of the workshops of
the world' during his childhood, and 'the embodiment of a great city'. His
father, Robert, worked at Metropolitan-Vickers at Trafford Park which
fuelled his interest in engineering and design. As a youngster, he was
fascinated with engineering and the process of designing which caused
him to pursue a career designing buildings.
 Foster was assigned the brief for a development
on the site of the Baltic Exchange in the 1990s. The Exchange was
damaged beyond repair by a bomb left by the IRA. Foster + Partners
submitted a plan for a 385 metre tall skyscraper, the London
Millennium Tower, but its height was seen as excessive for London's
skyline. The proposal was scrapped and instead Foster proposed 30
St Mary Axe, "the gherkin" due to its design which alluded to its shape.
Foster worked with engineers to integrate complex computer systems
with the most basic physical laws, such as convection. Green,
sustainable energy ideas include the complex facade which lets in air
for passive cooling and vents it as it warms and rises.
 30 St Mary Axe (widely known informally as "the
Gherkin" and previously the Swiss Re Building) is a skyscraper in
London's main financial district, the City of London, completed in
December 2003 and opened in April 2004. With 41 floors, the tower is
180 metres (591 ft) tall and stands on a street called St. Mary Axe, on the
former site of the Baltic Exchange, which was
extensively damaged in 1992 by the explosion
of a bomb placed by the Provisional IRA.

After the plans to build the

Millennium Tower were dropped, 30 St Mary
Axe was designed by Norman Foster and
Arup engineers, and was erected by
Skanska in 2001–2003.

The building has become an iconic

symbol of London and is one of the city's most widely
recognised examples of contemporary
architecture.
 The tower's topmost panoramic dome, known as the
"lens", recalls the iconic glass dome that covered part of the ground floor of
the Baltic Exchange.
The gherkin name was applied to the current building at
least as far back as 1999, referring to that plan's highly unorthodox layout
and appearance.

The building uses energy-saving methods which allow

it to use half the power that a similar tower would typically consume. Gaps
in each floor create six shafts that serve as a natural ventilation system for
the entire building even though required firebreaks on every sixth floor
interrupt the "chimney." The shafts create a giant double glazing effect; air
is sandwiched between two layers of glazing and insulates the office space
inside.
Architects promote double glazing in residential
houses to avoid the inefficient convection of heat, but the tower exploits
this effect. The shafts pull warm air out of the building during the summer
and warm the building in the winter using passive solar heating. The shafts
also allow sunlight to pass through the building, making the work
environment more pleasing, and keeping the lighting costs down.
 The primary methods for controlling wind-
excited sways are to increase the stiffness, or increase damping with
tuned/active mass dampers. To a design by Arup, its fully triangulated
perimeter structure makes the building sufficiently stiff without any extra
reinforcements. Despite its overall curved glass shape, there is only one
piece of curved glass on the building—the lens-shaped cap at the very
top.
On the building's top level (the 40th
floor), there is a bar for tenants and their guests featuring a 360° view of
London. A restaurant operates on the 39th floor, and private dining rooms
on the 38th. Whereas most buildings have extensive lift equipment on the
roof of the building, this was not possible for the Gherkin, since a bar had
been planned for the 40th floor. The architects dealt with this by having
the main lift only reach the 34th floor, and then having a push-from-below
lift to the 39th floor. There is a marble stairwell and a disabled persons' lift
which leads the visitor up to the bar in the dome.
 The Willis building in Ipswich, England is one of the
earliest buildings designed by Norman Foster after establishing Foster
Associates. Constructed between 1970 and 1975 for the insurance firm now
known as Willis Group Holdings, it is now seen as a landmark in the
development of the 'high tech' architectural style. The building houses some
1,300 office staff in open plan offices spread over three floors.

The centre of thebuilding is constructed from a grid of

concrete pillars, 14 m (46 ft) apart, supporting cantilevered concrete slab
floors. The exterior is clad in a dark smoked glass curtain wall. The use of
dark glass, a curtain wall and
lack of right angle corners
mirrors the art deco Express
Building in Manchester - one
of Norman Foster's favourite
buildings.
 In 1991 the Willis building became
the youngest building to be given Grade I listed building status in
Britain. At the time it was one of only two listed buildings under 30
years of age.
Originally there was also a
swimming pool for employees to enjoy during their lunch break. This
has now been covered up (not filled in due to it being a listed
building) and the space is used for more offices. The swimming pool
can be seen underneath the false floor.
 The current Reichstag dome is a glass dome,
constructed on top of the rebuilt Reichstag building in Berlin. It was
designed by architect Norman Foster and built to symbolize the
reunification of Germany. The distinctive appearance of the dome has
made it a prominent landmark in Berlin.

The Reichstag dome is a large glass dome with a 360

degree view of the surrounding Berlin cityscape. The debating chamber of
the Bundestag, the German parliament, can be seen down below. A
mirrored cone in the center of the dome directs sunlight into the building,
and so that visitors can see the
working of the chamber. The dome is
open to the public and can be reached
by climbing two steel, spiraling ramps
that are reminiscent of a double-helix.
The Dome symbolizes that the people
are above the government, as was not
the case during National Socialism.
 On February 27, 1933, the dome was
destroyed along with the rest of the building in the Reichstag fire, an act
blamed on the Communists, despite there being little evidence to
determine who actually started the fire. The remains of the building and
the dome were further demolished with the bombings of Berlin through
World War II and the eventual fall of Berlin to the Soviets in 1945.

The glass dome was also designed by Foster to

be environmentally friendly. Energy efficient features involving the use of
the daylight shining through the mirrored cone were applied, effectively
decreasing the carbon emissions of the building.

The futuristic and transparent design of the

Reichstag dome makes it a unique landmark, and symbolizes Berlin's
attempt to move away from a past of Nazism and instead towards a
future with a heavier emphasis on a united, democratic Germany.
The Reichstag before the war with original dome
 The Hearst Tower is a building
located at 300 West 57th Street, 959 Eighth
Avenue, near Columbus Circle in midtown
Manhattan, New York City, New York. It is
the world headquarters of the Hearst
Corporation, bringing together for the first
time their numerous publications and
communications companies under one roof

The tower — designed by the

architect Norman Foster, structurally
engineered by WSP Cantor Seinuk, and
constructed by Turner construction – is 46
stories tall, standing 182 meters (597 ft) with
80,000 square metres (860,000 sq ft) of office
space. The uncommon triangular framing
pattern (also known as a diagrid) required
9,500 metric tons (10,480 tons) of structural
steel — reportedly about 20% less than a
conventional steel frame.
 Hearst Tower is the first "green" high-rise office
building completed in New York City, with a number of environmental
considerations built into the plan. The floor of the atrium is paved with heat
conductive limestone. Polyethylene tubing is embedded under the floor and
filled with circulating water for cooling in the summer and heating in the
winter. Rain collected on the roof is stored in a tank in the basement for use
in the cooling system, to irrigate plants and for the water sculpture in the
main lobby. 85% of the building's structural steel contains recycled material.

Overall, the building has been designed to use

26% less energy than the minimum requirements for the city of New York,
and earned a gold designation from the United States Green Building
Council’s LEED certification program, becoming New York City's first LEED
Gold skyscraper.
The six-story base of the headquarters building
was commissioned by the founder, William Randolph Hearst and awarded to
the architect Joseph Urban. The building was completed in 1928[3] at a cost
of $2 million and contained 40,000 square feet (3,700 m2). The original cast
stone facade has been preserved in the new design as a designated
Landmark site. Originally built as the base for a proposed skyscraper, the
construction of the tower was postponed due to the Great Depression. The
new tower addition was completed nearly eighty years later, and 2,000
Hearst employees moved in on June 26, 2006.
 The atrium features escalators which run
through a 3-story water sculpture titled Icefall, a wide waterfall built with
thousands of glass panels, which cools and humidifies the lobby air. The
water element is complemented by a 70-foot-tall (21 m) fresco painting
titled Riverlines by artist Richard Long
 REM KOOLHAAS

Remment Lucas "Rem" Koolhaas (born 17

November 1944) is a Dutch architect, architectural theorist, urbanist and
Professor in Practice of Architecture and Urban Design at the Graduate
School of Design at Harvard University. Koolhaas studied at the
Architectural Association School of Architecture in London and at Cornell
University in Ithaca, New York. Koolhaas is
the founding partner of OMA, and of its
research-oriented counterpart AMO based
in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. In 2005, he
co-founded Volume Magazine

In 2000, Rem Koolhaas won

the Pritzker Prize. In 2008, Time put him in
their top 100 of The World's Most
Influential People.
 Koolhaas first came to public and critical attention
with OMA (The Office for Metropolitan Architecture), the office he founded
in 1975 together with architects Elia Zenghelis, Zoe Zenghelis and
(Koolhaas's wife) Madelon Vriesendorp in London. They were later joined
by one of Koolhaas's students, Zaha Hadid - who would soon go on to
achieve success in her own right. An early work which would mark their
difference from the then dominant postmodern classicism of the late
1970s, was their contribution to the Venice Biennale of 1980, curated by
Italian architect Paolo Portoghesi, titled "Presence of the Past". Each
architect had to design a stage-like "frontage" to a Potemkin-type internal
street; the façades by Costantino Dardi, Frank Gehry and OMA were the
only ones that did not employ Post-Modern architecture motifs or
historical references.
 Other early critically received (yet unbuilt) projects
included the Parc de la Villette, Paris (1982) and the residence for the
President of Ireland (1981), as well as the Kunsthal in Rotterdam (1992).
These schemes would attempt to put into practice many of the findings
Koolhaas made in his book Delirious New York (1978), which was written
while he was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Architecture and Urban
Studies in New York, directed by Peter Eisenman.

In October 2008, Rem Koolhaas was invited for a

European "group of the wise" under the chairmanship of former Spanish
prime minister Felipe González to help 'design' the future European
Union.
The combination of Koolhaas’s theoretical writings
with his fondness for asymmetry, challenging spatial explorations, and
unexpected uses of colour led many to classify him as a deconstructivist.
However, his work, unlike that of other deconstructivists, does not rely
heavily on theory, and it is imbued with a strong sense of humanity and a
concern for the role that architecture plays in everyday life, particularly in
an urban context.
 Delirious New York (a book) set the pace for
Koolhaas's career. Koolhaas celebrates the "chance-like" nature of city
life: "The City is an addictive machine from which there is no escape"
"Rem Koolhaas...defined the city as a collection of “red hot spots.”
(Anna Klingmann). As Koolhaas himself has acknowledged, this
approach had already been evident in the Japanese Metabolist
Movement in the 1960s and early 1970s.

A key aspect of architecture that Koolhaas

interrogates is the "Program": with the rise of modernism in the 20th
century the "Program" became the key theme of architectural design.
The notion of the Program involves "an act to edit function and human
activities" as the pretext of architectural design: epitomised in the
maxim Form follows function, first popularised by architect Louis
Sullivan at the beginning of the 20th century. The notion was first
questioned in Delirious New York, in his analysis of high-rise
architecture in Manhattan. An early design method derived from such
thinking was "cross-programming", introducing unexpected functions in
room programmes, such as running tracks in skyscrapers.
 Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan is
an engaging review of modern architecture and urbanism, setting a
celebratory account of the surreal ‘culture of congestion’ found in
Manhattan. Written while Rem Koolhaas was a visiting professor at the
Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in New York, and first published
in 1978 - written during a period of financial crisis, with the city government
narrowly avoiding bankruptcy through a substantial federal loan. At a time
when confidence in the city is at an all time low, Koolhaas promotes
Manhattan as a prototype of the modern metropolis, a collaboration of
visionaries that strive to make life in the city a ‘deeply irrational experience’.
 The first chapter gives an overview of the history of the
island, discovered in 1609, and depicted by a French artist as existing
European components reassembled into a single location, ‘A Utopian
Europe’. A utopia that is indifferent to topography, imposing the mental over
the real. The grid system in Manhattan predicted the future condition of the
city; its two dimensional restrictions gave way to three dimensional
freedom, and the millions of people that it now houses was envisaged far
before a tiny proportion were even present. Much like the grid, central park
was created long before the programmes which fill it had been realised,
quoted as ‘a colossal leap of faith, the contrast it describes – between the
built and the unbuilt – hardly exists at the time of its creation.’

The book is a representation of the grid: ‘a collection of blocks

whose proximity and juxtaposition reinforce their separate meanings.’ Each
block correlates to a chapter; Coney Island, the Skyscraper, Rockefeller
Centre and Europeans.
 The next landmark publication by Koolhaas was
S,M,L,XL, together with Bruce Mau, Jennifer Sigler, and Hans
Werlemann (1995), a 1376-page tome combining essays, manifestos,
diaries, fiction, travelogues, and meditations on the contemporary city.
The layout of the huge book transformed architectural publishing, and
such books—full-colour graphics and dense texts—have since become
common. Ostensibly, S,M,L,XL gives a record of the actual
implementation of "Manhattanism" throughout the various (mostly
unrealized) projects and texts OMA had generated up to that time.
 The part lexicon-type layout (with a marginal
"dictionary" composed by Jennifer Sigler, who also edited the book)
spawned a number of concepts that have become common in later
architectural theory, in particular "Bigness": 'old' architectural principles
(composition, scale, proportion, detail) no longer apply when a building
acquires Bigness. This was demonstrated in OMA's scheme for the
development of "Euralille" (1990–94), a new centre for the city of Lille in
France, a city returned to prominence by its position on the new rail route
from Paris to London via the Channel Tunnel.

OMA sited a train station, two centres for

commerce and trade, an urban park, and 'Congrexpo' (a contemporary
Grand Palais with a large concert hall, three auditoria and an exhibition
space). In another essay in the book, titled "The Generic City", Koolhaas
declares that progress, identity, architecture, the city and the street are
things of the past: “Relief … it’s over. That is the story of the city. The city
is no longer. We can leave the theatre now...”
 The book's title is also its framework: projects
and essays are arranged according to scale. While Small and Medium
address issues ranging from the domestic to the public, Large focuses on
what Koolhaas calls "the architecture of Bigness." Extra-Large features
projects at the urban scale, along with the important essay "What Ever
Happened to Urbanism?" and other studies of the contemporary city.
Running throughout the book is a "dictionary" of an adventurous new
Koolhaasian language -- definitions, commentaries, and quotes from
hundreds of literary, cultural, artistic, and architectural sources.
 Koolhaas's next landmark
publications were a product of his position as
professor at Harvard University, in the design
school's "Project on the City"; firstly the 720-
page Mutations, followed by The Harvard Design
School Guide to Shopping (2002) and The Great
Leap Forward (2002). All three books involved
Koolhaas's students analysing what others would
regard as "non-cities", sprawling conglomerates
such as Lagos in Nigeria, west Africa, which the
authors argue are highly functional despite a lack
of infrastructure. The authors also examine the
influence of shopping habits and the recent rapid
growth of cities in China. Critics of the books
have criticised Koolhaas for being cynical – as if
Western capitalism and globalization demolish all
cultural identity – highlighted in the notion
expounded in the books that "In the end, there
will be little else for us to do but shop". However,
such cynicism can alternatively be read as a
"realism" about the transformation of cultural life,
where airports and even museums (due to
finance problems) rely just as much on operating
gift shops.
 Destined to become a crucial presence in the twenty-first
century through sheer size alone, the Pearl River Delta region of the
People's Republic of China - a cluster of five cities with a population of 12
million that will become a megalopolis of 36 million inhabitants by the year
2020 - has been gripped by a relentless pursuit of development at a scale
and velocity previously unseen in the world. This maelstrom of
modernization has been hastened by the presence of two Special
Economic Zones in the Pearl River Delta: laboratories for the combined
experimentation of communism and capitalism that have produced an
entirely new urban substance. Great Leap Forward is based on field work
conducted in 1996 and consists of a series of interrelated studies
investigating a complex urban condition that has resulted from a uniquely
transformed political environment.

Koolhaas continuously incorporates his observations of the

contemporary city within his design activities: calling such a condition the
‘culture of congestion’. Again, shopping is examined for "intellectual
comfort", whilst the unregulated taste and densification of Chinese cities is
analysed according to "performance", a criterion involving variables with
debatable credibility: density, newness, shape, size, money etc.
 In 2005, Rem Koolhaas co-founded Volume Magazine
together with Mark Wigley and Ole Bouman. Volume Magazine – the
collaborative project by Archis (Amsterdam), AMO Rotterdam and C-lab
(Columbia University NY) – is a dynamic experimental think tank devoted to
the process of spatial and cultural reflexivity. It goes beyond architecture’s
definition of ‘making buildings’ and reaches out for global views on
architecture and design, broader attitudes to social structures, and creating
environments to live in. The magazine stands for a journalism which detects
and anticipates, is proactive and even pre-emptive – a journalism which
uncovers potentialities, rather than covering done deals.
 The CCTV Headquarters is a 234 m (768 ft), 44-
storey skyscraper on East Third Ring Road, Guanghua Road in the Beijing
Central Business District (CBD). The CCTV Headquarters won the 2013
Best Tall Building Worldwide from the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban
Habitat.
The main building is not a
traditional tower, but a loop of six
horizontal and vertical sections covering
473,000 m2 (5,090,000 sq ft) of floor
space, creating an irregular grid on the
building's facade with an open center. The
construction of the building is considered
to be a structural challenge, especially
because it is in a seismic zone. Because
of its radical shape, it's said that a taxi
driver first came up with its nickname dà
kùchǎ, roughly translated as, "big boxer
shorts". Locals often refer to it as "big
pants".
 The 10,000-square metre main lobby, in Tower 1, is an atrium
stretching three floors underground, and three floors up. It has a direct
connection with Beijing's subway network, and will be the arrival and
departure hub for the 10,000 workers inside CCTV headquarters.
Connected to the lobby, 12 studios (the largest is 2,000 square metres)
perform the main function of the building: TV making.
 Casa da Música (English: House of Music) is a major concert
hall space in Porto, Portugal which houses the cultural institution of the
same name with its three orchestras Orquestra Nacional do Porto,
Orquestra Barroca and Remix Ensemble. It was designed by the Dutch
architect Rem Koolhaas with Office for Metropolitan Architecture and Arup-
AFA, and was built as part of Porto's project for European Culture Capital
in 2001 but was only finished in the first half of 2005 and immediately
became an icon in the city. Inside Outside (Petra Blaisse) designed the
large 13 curtains, ranging from 22mx15m to 65mx8m, and the gold leaf
wood grain pattern on the large auditorium.

The site of the building

used to be a holding place for
the trams that ran in Porto.
Although construction ran four
years over schedule and cost
roughly €100M, the building
process brought new
engineering challenges to
create its unusual
configuration.
 The building's design has been highly acclaimed
worldwide. Nicolai Ouroussoff, architecture critic from the New York
Times, classified it as the "most attractive project the architect Rem
Koolhaas has ever built" and saying it's "a building whose intellectual
ardor is matched by its sensual beauty". He also compares it to the
"exuberant design" in Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao,
Spain. "Only looking into the original aspect of the building, this is one of
the most important concert halls built in the last 100 years". He compares
it to the Walt Disney Concert Hall, in Los Angeles, and the Berliner
Philharmonie.
 Casa da Música has two main auditoriums, though many other
areas of the building can very easily be adapted for concerts and other
musical activity (workshops, educational activities, etc.).:

-The large auditorium has an initial capacity of 1,238 people, but can vary
according to the occasion.
-The small auditorium is tremendously flexible, and has no definite
number in relation to the capacity. On average the room has capacity for
300 people sitting down, and 650 people standing, though these can
drastically change depending on the size of the stage, its location, the
arrangement of the chairs, the presence and size of sound and recording
equipment, etc.
-The restaurant at the top of the building was opened far later than was
originally planned. Functioning since August 2006, the restaurant's original
planned capacity for 250 people was decreased to space for some 150.

“By considering the building as a solid mass, from which

we eliminated the two concert halls and all other public facilities, we created
a hollowed-out block that reveals its contents without being didactic and, at
the same time, exposes the city. The building is both clear and mysterious -
the diagram becomes an architectural adventure.”
-OMA
The folded glass "curtains" allow for slightly
distorted views of the city.
East - West Section North - South Section
 The Seattle Public Library's
Central Library is the flagship library of
The Seattle Public Library system. The
11-story (185 feet or 56 meters high)
glass and steel building in downtown
Seattle, Washington was opened to the
public on Sunday, May 23, 2004.

The 362,987 square foot

(34,000 m²) public library can hold about
1.45 million books and other materials,
features underground public parking for
143 vehicles, and includes over 400
computers open to the public. Over 2
million individuals visited the new library
in its first year.
The library has a unique,
striking appearance, consisting of several
discrete "floating platforms" seemingly
wrapped in a large steel net around glass
skin. Architectural tours of the building
began on June 5, 2006.
 The architects conceived the new Central Library building as a
celebration of books, deciding after some research that despite the arrival of
the 21st century and the "digital age," people still respond to books printed
on paper. The architects also worked to make the library inviting to the
public, rather than stuffy, which they discovered was the popular perception
of libraries as a whole.
Although the library is an unusual shape from the outside, the
architects' philosophy was
to let the building's required
functions dictate what it
should look like, rather than
imposing a structure and
making the functions
conform to that.
Each platform is a programmatic cluster that is architecturally defined and
equipped for maximum, dedicated performance. Because each platform is
designed for a unique purpose, their size, flexibility, circulation, palette,
structure, and MEP vary.

The spaces in between the platforms function as trading floors where

librarians inform and stimulate, where the interface between the different
platforms is organized—spaces for work, interaction, and play.
 A major section of the building is the "Books Spiral," (designed to
display the library's nonfiction collection without breaking up the Dewey
Decimal System classification onto different floors or sections). The
collection spirals up through four stories on a continuous series of shelves.
This allows patrons to peruse the entire collection without using stairs or
traveling to a different part of the building.
Site plan
Level 2 plan
Level 3 plan
section AA
section BB
south elevation
north elevation
Thank you