In Conversation: Lord Norman Foster
Lifetime Achievement Medal Winner
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‘Technology is the means, alongside the lessons of history,’ says Lord Norman Foster, winner of the 2025 London Design Medal for lifetime achievement.
For the world-renowned architect – author of hundreds of offices, airports, cultural buildings and masterplans across the globe – this conviction has guided more than 60 years in practice.
Foster has long believed that design can enhance our lives, materially and spiritually. To achieve this, he has consistently developed what we now understand as sustainable technology – before we even had the language to describe it. ‘In the 1960s, we were promoting buildings that worked with nature to harvest and reduce energy, promoting solar and wind, optimising natural light, recycling water and converting waste to fertiliser,’ he recalls. ‘These principles were viewed as a fringe activity – the most dramatic change since then is that they have now become mainstream and the public has embraced them.’
His aspirations and priorities have been constant over time, he adds. ‘The role of architects and designers today is surely the same as yesterday, even if the tools and materials have changed. The power of design to effect change for good is as alive today as it ever was.’ But what architects do need, he argues, is to develop advocacy and communication skills, because ‘many of the big environmental decisions are governmental and therefore political’.
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The methods of working have, of course, transformed. ‘We have witnessed the revolution from hand drawing to the age of the computer. But, against many predictions, elements of the analogue world have not changed. Models, for example, are even more treasured now as a design tool than in the past.’
Asked what he is most proud of, Foster points not to individual buildings but to people.
‘It’s the cultivation of the team – not just architects, but the many other disciplines we have promoted, all working together. When the outcome of that coming together is seamless work of design, that is rewarding for everyone involved.’
He is best known to the public for designing the Gherkin – arguably London’s most recognisable modern building and one of many other canonical forms by his practice. Nonetheless, the elusive notion of ‘iconic’ architecture, he suggests, is best understood through lived experience. At a party this summer marking 50 years of the Willis Faber building in Ipswich – a radical, low-rise ‘ground scraper’ completed in the 1970s – guests shared stories of how the building had shaped their lives, with its roof garden, restaurant, swimming pool, bright colours, and space for events from across the town and region. ‘They were talking with pride in thirty, forty and even fifty years of living in the architecture,’ he says. ‘For them it was iconic not because it was different, but because it was embraced and loved by those who used it as well as the community of which it is a part. It became an icon of the place.’
For Foster, the social agenda is paramount: from infrastructure that defines cities, to cancer care centres for Maggie’s, to hospitals designed to comfort and heal. ‘To see the power of design to transform the lives of patients, doctors and nurses – that is tangible impact.’
His guiding principles remains simple:
‘Stay a student. Be curious, eager to learn, open-minded, a good listener. Question, challenge – but above all, be humble.’
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