Flights of futuristic fantasy

The Great Court of the British Museum is a good place to start. Norman Foster brought light into the wonderfully elegant and inspiring glazed space at the heart of the museum where there had been nothing but greyness around the domed Reading Room. It also put Lord Foster of Thames Bank OM at the heart of the British cultural establishment.

Why don’t we know more about him? His creative achievement is enormous. He is 75 this year and his firm grows, employing over 1,000 people in 25 offices around the world. His clients include rulers of Middle Eastern oil rich states; the President of Kazakhstan; Commander Chen, responsible for all the new airports in China; Swiss banks and Russian oligarchs.

This book is the authorised biography, which rather puts it in the category of the approved corporate history. It avoids hagio- graphy but somehow it fails to explore in any depth what it is that inspires the architectural creative juices to flow? It is a difficult task to analyse such a huge built output and explain the workings of a giant practice that moves around the entire world like a superb and impersonal machine.

Deyan Sudjic is a thorough journalist and he gives us excessive detail about the early life of this misunderstood and unloved only child, raised in the deprived suburbs of Manchester. What emerges clearly is a silent and determined personality fascinated by futuristic technology; reading about Dan Dare and outer space in The Eagle; and somehow discovering Le Corbusier in the oasis of the public library. Surely young Norman must have been influenced more than we are told during his National Service in the RAF? Did he develop his fascination with flight and nurture his determination to train as an architect at Manchester University? The great liberation was getting to America (Foster flew, Richard Rogers went by sea) and meeting his hero architects at Yale.