Norman Foster’s Empire of Image Control

Norman Foster, the British architect, resembles the titans he serves. 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. Foster’s career is now in its seventh decade. He has been given every architectural prize, for every kind of civic, cultural, and commercial building. He has also been financially rewarded in a way that no other professional architect ever has: with large homes around the world, and with many art works and exotic cars, including one previously owned by Le Corbusier. He has a namesake foundation, in Madrid, that has begun to accept students and is halfway to being a private university. He used to pilot a helicopter to work; today, when a member of his domestic staff, dressed in white, serves coffee, she’ll fold one arm behind her back. Michael Bloomberg once described his collaboration with Foster, on a European headquarters in London, as one between “a billionaire who wanted to be an architect and an architect who wanted to be a billionaire.”

Foster, who since 1999 has been Lord Foster of Thames Bank, is eighty-nine, unusually fit, and very carefully dressed—suggesting a dapper gentleman on the edge of a Fellini scene. He spends part of every year on Martha’s Vineyard, on a thirty-acre compound that he bought in 2011. There, on a late morning last July, he was on his second bike ride of the day. His first, at dawn, had taken him down quiet local roads for a little less than his usual thirty miles. He then returned home for video calls with some of the twenty-four hundred colleagues who, in eighteen offices in twelve countries, work at Foster + Partners, the firm he founded, where he is both a kind of brand ambassador and, still, a design leader. Foster sat at a long glass table of his own design, on which he’d arranged his paperwork, in a neat grid of neat piles. Each pile was a project then under way. Together, the piles represented real-estate investments of at least twenty billion dollars.

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