Norman Foster by Deyan Sudjic

Author:Deyan Sudjic [SUDJIC, DEYAN]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ARC000000, BIO000000, BIO001000, ARC006000
ISBN: 9781468302769
Publisher: Overlook
Published: 2012-04-21T05:00:00+00:00

While most competitors saw the briefing session in Hong Kong as an opportunity to explore Asia (for a British architect still an exotic location in 1979), the Fosters and Spencer de Grey cancelled their planned tour of the Far East, and opted to stay on in Hong Kong instead. They wanted to see behind the scenes at the bank and to get a fuller insight into its operations. Over the course of three weeks the trio did not stop asking questions, sometimes to the exasperation of bank officials who could not see the relevance of a close examination of the queuing system on the existing private banking floor to an architect starting to think about how to design an entirely different building.

Foster was asking questions about Hong Kong as well as about the bank. The concept of Feng Shui, Chinese geomancy, intrigued Foster. Although Roy Munden assured competitors that the bank would take care of the Feng Shui issue, Foster decided to commission an independent geomancer. From the ensuing meeting, they took home a drawing that showed an open base, aligned between the mountains and the sea. Spencer de Grey is dismissive of those who see Feng Shui as a mystical or arcane practice: ‘Mostly it is a very sensible way of thinking about alignment, ventilation and aspect.’ But it was not until much later that Foster realised the connection between what he was building and that diagram.

Armed with the findings of their interrogations, they returned to the office in Fitzroy Street to consider not just how to design a bank, but also how to win the competition, and to think about how, having won, they would go about actually building it. In this, they showed an awareness that the bank were looking not so much for a finished design, but for an architect that they would feel able to work with.

Predictably, Foster was unwilling to focus on the problem constraining himself within the limits framed by the brief. He wanted to explore other options too. In fact, in the 127-page report that Foster Associates eventually submitted to the bank, a mere fourteen pages were devoted to the two options suggested in the official brief. Foster analysed both strategies, found them equally flawed and moved on. Instead, he proposed an alternative approach that he described as phased regeneration.

As he suggested in his presentation, ‘designing a building without the benefit of a working relationship is rather like a game of blind man’s bluff’. Foster’s strategy could be understood as an attempt to get the job not so much by dazzling his clients with the image of the perfect building that he could give them, but by convincing them that he was too smart and too sophisticated to do anything so unsubtle. Foster’s report was a deliberate attempt to show the bank that his team had analysed in forensic detail not just the kind of building envisaged by the brief, but every other possibility too, and that they had come to understand the issues facing the bank as well as it understood them itself.

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