Julia Fullerton-Batten for The New Yorker

New work by photographer Julia Fullerto-Batten for this profile of architect Norman Foster in the latest New Yorker. View her full portfolio here.

Norman Foster, whose career is now in its seventh decade, has been given every architectural prize and has been financially rewarded in a way that no other professional architect ever has. The British architect “resembles the titans he serves,” Ian Parker writes. “His expansionist ambition and personal wealth set him alongside the leaders of such companies as JPMorgan Chase, Apple, Bloomberg, Hyundai, and the Saudi National Bank, who have hired him to design landmark office buildings of beautifully controlled, rarefied egomania.” Michael Bloomberg once described his collaboration with Foster as one between “a billionaire who wanted to be an architect and an architect who wanted to be a billionaire.”

Foster’s overarching achievement is his company, Foster + Partners. Though it is not the largest architectural firm in the world, it’s by far the largest that has a Pritzker Prize winner in its name. Its best-known work includes Apple’s ring-shaped headquarters and the Hearst Tower. With his firm, Foster built an architectural machine that could execute acclaimed, precise work at an unprecedentedly high volume. He was the first in the profession to dismantle the distinction between two kinds of architectural success: that of the architect-auteur and that of the big, anonymous corporate practice.

At Foster + Partners, the offices don’t close at night, or on Christmas. A project revision might happen in a delirium of all-night and weekend work. This is the core of the business: people draw ten versions of a stairway, or a lobby, and agree to develop the best one, and then someone—possibly Foster—starts to wonder about an eleventh version. “Foster is very good at designing. But he’s also very good at making others not stop designing,” Parker writes. At the link in our bio, read a Profile of the architect who has dotted continents with tidy, elegant structures. Photograph by Julia Fullerton-Batten for The New Yorker.

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