Norman Foster, architect, London

I find it very difficult to separate my passions for flight and architecture and um in 1975 I became an owner in this aircraft and at the time in a similar talk at the University of East Anglia I describe this as as beautiful if not more beautiful than a branzi in that year here with another pilot it's a two seater we set a a record for time uh for speed and distance and over 300 kilm with no engine we cruised at an average speed of 90 km uh an hour but the whether it's architecture in the Sky Architecture of the sky um I realize that when Jonathan offered this as a title that the capturing of the sky uh the embracing of Nature and the symbolism of the sky was something that over 50 years had permeated my world of of of architecture from the very first sketches through to a finished building that it was evocative of light and lightness and suggested in in harnessing the forces of nature and working with nature The Quest For A Greener uh more sustainable uh architecture and um and in a way the ideal building would be something like a tree it would breathe and it would respond to changes in the seasons the heat the cool it would also um be inspirational as a structure the way in which it caner lever us sits in the landscape is at Harmony with the landscape but reaches out how hydraulically and absorbs the carbon dioxide uh in the air so something that is is beautiful uh is highly functional and all these kind of merge into one totality and um and it occurred to me that that many of these metaphors come together in not in a building but in the Mio Viaduct that was that was mentioned uh earlier mioct doesn't absorb carbon dioxide but it certainly has a very sustainable story and it is also related to the landscape and um and is evocative of flight it really does penetrate the clouds quite literally it's a ribbon 2.5 kilm long vast spans but very very slender uh structure it's treel likee in terms of its cables the color of the cables is very much the color of the sky very conscious design decision it's about transparency it's about locking into the view it's a humanistic vision of what infrastructure might be um and it has quite interesting its own story in terms of the way uh that it performs it um in scale the tallest of these uh columns is something like 17 M uh taller than the Eiffel Tower um it creates a shortcut before this Viaduct you would have a tail back of some 35 kilomet with five hour delays going through moo going through the local region uh instead of being able to LEAP across the Great uh the Great Valley and um and if you consider that something like 1500 trucks uh cross this Viaduct daily and and the journey time between Paris and peran is reduced by an hour and a quarter then that translates into something like 36,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide which is saved so the analogy with the tree is in many ways quite apt the way in which it relates to the landscape it touches the ground very lightly very delicately it's that vertical caner lever it's the minimum imprint on the lands cape and the flying insect insect the grasshopper again is symbolic of that so whether it's a a massive piece of infrastructure or whether it's a a small table the way in which it relates to the ground is is is actually a kind of Continuum and um it was quite once the idea of the sky as a generator which embraced all the projects which I've been associated with um encouraged me to look at some unbuilt projects and this little sketch is of one of several Pavilions that were conceived for the Fred olssen organization in the 1970s the early' 70s and the site was a forest and um many of the much larger buildings the skyscrapers and so on all the principles are are here reflected Which pull sunlight deep into the building in the uh Low Winter Sun uh hovering over the forest floor and extracting cool air um and working with nature reducing the uh high energy consuming traditional uh air conditioning uh systems and um and again just sitting very daintily uh in its Forest setting and earlier project still a project from the 1960s the skybreak house um its relationship to the landscape is much more of the landscape it grows out of a slope uh contained between uh two houses in a residential uh area so it focuses the views and you have the kind of poetry of feeling that you're not in an urbanity but basically it's about the sky and it's about the distant View and this uh steps down the hill as you can see here growing out of the landscape and if we take a slice through that building as a cross-section then again the early sketches the sky is a dominant and when that's translated into a building it is again very much at Harmony and and those sketches whether it's for a small uh home or whether it's for a major office uh complex the Willis fabber building also of the 70s and the concept sketches when translated are very much about moving up towards the sky uh embracing the the sun creating landscape uh on the roof and um and this becomes a transparent building at night but during the day again it engages with the uh with the clouds with the sky um and with its Urban surroundings and uh those uh those principles uh of an ecological low energy building a building that would be humanized um and brought Alive by its dialogue with nature this is the concept sketch for the sainsbury center an Arts Complex and a gallery for the extraordinary collection of the of the sainsbury family and it is very much a kind of light box um and it can control the light so it could be blacked out in the way that this space is here or it can Embrace uh the light um and um and again talking about light and lightness and the um the kind of um theme of flying machines rather amusingly on the occasion of my 60th birthday the uh the sainsburys presented me with aw ing by uh by an artist um they were going through a rather difficult period at the time I think it was a period of student unrest and um and the building wasn't being as well received at that time as it has been since so this artist suggested rather whimsically that it was so light the helicopter could come along and take it somewhere else um uh that um that theme um led to to in the late 1980s what you might call the reinvention of the airport uh terminal as we know it and this was pretty typical at the time of that commission and I remember Norman Payne who headed out British airports Authority an engineer at the time saying he felt it was time to create a new generation airport and um and to achieve that what we did was literally to turn this diagram upside down I mean this is a solid roof it's full of ducks and Machinery heavy equipment um it's pretty closed you don't know where you're going it's disorientating it was typical of the airports of that period And if you took a diagram of that then you have a kind of roof structure which is more Bridge likee solid on the left at the top you can see what that roof would look like in terms of its equipment and the space below which was pretty soulless also quite high energy consuming because if you're blocking out the natural light then you need artificial light the artificial light generates heat therefore you need cooling all very uh expensive and high maintenance and um the solution was to as I say turn it upside down put all the heavy equipment where it is sits more comfortably on the ground rather than Up on the Roof it's also easier to get out and once you bring the light in then you have uh a totally different experience so it really is harmonizing with nature it's working with the sky it's reducing energy and it's producing a more joyful place where you really can uh see the elements and and see the aircraft that you're going to it crossed my mind that in a way the canala is emblematic of modernity and um and there are interesting parallels between the early uh passenger carrying aircraft uh the Bane which was a bridge-like structure and um and the stanstead uh kind of breakthrough is very much again a kind of celebration of the Calver and something we take for granted in terms of modern aircraft and if one elaborated this theme further then at a particular point in time you'll see that everybody is doing the caner uh steel uh tubular chair for example so I think it is um it's very symbolic in the way that this uh diagram of uh of Hong Kong airport if stanstead was revolutionary um then our airports that follow up to a certain point are evolutionary in the sense that Hong Kong almost looking like a flying machine itself half a million square met 1.2 km long um they improve on the model they refine it they develop it um and um rather in the way that artifacts like a phone may be revolutionary and then you get a series of additions it improves the performance perhaps the appearance uh offers more facilities and um and Hong Kong if I took on that uh very very thin uh part of the building which recedes into the distance if we were in there we would see that the light and the structure were harmonized were integrated and were leading us uh towards our destination um so all very much about capturing the sky capturing the sun working with the elements and and also that sense of orientation what I call an analog experience in a digital Wing in a digital world and um again the aircraft in in the distance is also uh symbolic in its enlarged version as um as Jonathan said you've done the biggest in the world now you can do the smallest airport in the world and this uh Beijing is the uh is the largest in the world currently and it it magnifies uh Hong Kong by a factor of three it's 3 and a/4 kilm long it's 1 and A2 million square fet uh square meters um area and um and again it is almost evocative of a flying creature and interestingly in the local kind of folklore um it's it's not just about capturing the sky but it's also um referred to as Dragon Light in its appearance whether it picks up on the tradition of the colors of the Forbidden uh city um and integrates those colors that we most associate uh China with the range of Reds through oranges through yellows through Golds so those colors permeate uh the project and uh and color almost literally the sky which is the great umbrella over these uh vast spaces but the building is actually interestingly referred to by by those who use it as really very comforting so although it's very large in scale you compare this building with say five or six terminals at a Heathrow or or a Kennedy um and with an internal rail then it is very very comfortable it's at this point of the uh uh evolutionary kind of cycle of airports um that I questioned whether the next move might be to take away the columns and take away the idea of a roof and walls and uh connections to the aircraft all being different components different languages and questioned whether it wouldn't be possible to create one seamless kind of umbrella which would curve Arch at one point become the roof another Point become the walls reach out and connect with the aircraft uh something that would be more organic could for example the more traditional 36 M span between these columns could that be 100 m 170 m and um and Mexico airport which is smaller than Beijing but larger than Hong Kong somewhere in the middle uh a competition that uh that we won last year and is now under intensive design development to break ground early next year you can see here um the kind of heroic span the way in which that membrane uh comes down to the ground and um and we're studying this uh as as a project using the medium of film and um so I'm going to show a few clips of that it's overtaken by time but the spirit is is unchanged and so this kind of fly through shows the generosity the scale the quality of light the way in which the shell can become funnels which bring light and water to the ground the spans are truly heroic the largest span is 170 m normally it's around 100 m um and again very much about the flow of people it may well be uh a museum in spirit May encourage artifacts from the collection of the Museum of anthropology so it has it has many themes and ideas which currently uh flow through the the project but these are rather designed tools to uh to develop the concept along with uh fullsize Elements which we look at and which we uh prototype as we as we move along the that seemingly um abrupt leap um kind of jump from the earlier generation of uh of airport development to the the Mexico one um was informed by a body of of work outside of the world of airports and very much as was mentioned earlier Bucky who I collaborated with worked with for the last 12 years of his life was always referring to the world of nature doing more with less and the influence of of Nature and its structures on uh on his work which was very much about the daxin the geodisc structures this is the 1967 Montreal Expo and um and those find residents in a number of our projects which explore large span lightweight structures which are very much about modifying the quality of natural light um what you will not pick up on this is that this roof is very very efficient in terms of cutting down solar heat solar gain it has a series of um paint dots on the surface so it's about 70% opaque you would only know it if you took one of those panels out and you could see the real Sky Beyond but that line of development uh here in Washington in the Smithsonian and um and here at the uh at the Reich Stag and the Reich stag brings a number of these themes together capturing the view bringing light bringing the sky literally reflecting the sky right down into the heart of the assembly uh area itself the uh the political uh focus and here you can see the way in which the reflector uh brings that right down into the uh the body of the building but also there's a very strong um uh agenda of sustainability behind the uh project so it harnesses the sun um uh through a series of devices through geothermal through uh biofuels renewable energies photovoltaics natural ventilation um and um and that capturing of the of the sun and the idea of the sun and the sky driving a building complex it's probably taken right now to its most extreme in one experiment in the desert um in in Abu Dhabi which is the Mazda project and here this 10 megawatt uh energy field 22 hectars uh in area is driving um with a lot of surplus energy fed back into the grid is driving the first third of the Mazda experimental project which is a project uh devoted to a university there are 500 students there 100 teachers um and that is exploring the whole world of of of solar and um I didn't know quite whether here working with Johnny Cox who heads out our film unit and theind and we discussed and said should we show the film that we made to communicate the idea or should we show it actually as it is now and um and the decision was made to mix it all up and and it's quite interesting I don't I find it very difficult to separate out the reality from uh from the simulations and the visualizations but the combination of the two I think capture the uh the spirit of this desert uh Community which again uses the materials of the area um it has robot cars which may drive from the outside here you can see the robot cars and the multi-layering so the lower uh area is is designed for mobility and the upper area is for pedestrians and scaled accordingly so here you get glimpses of the student accommodation you get glimpses of the two types of buildings one is about the university and the other about residences they explore new materials new Concepts wind towers and here we morph into the reality as it is today um quite thriving uh Community again local materials the red you see uh is the red of the sand of the desert um and the number of of Explorations which are ongoing those are the students uh already there this is the building these are real um but then these are not real but they could be um so it is about exploration experimentation it's an in m in a future for this oil rich country in a future which will not necessarily be oil rich and depend on newer cleaner uh Technologies so again very much a kind of uh living experiment the that was only possible by applying the lessons from native indigenous architecture in the desert before an age of cheap energy so it came out of studying settlements like this and also the way in which um in a previous age hundreds of years centuries back uh they would be able to capture through domestic scaled um wind towers the cooler Desert Breezes and and and and modify the temperature together with vegetation Courtyards so these early communities were in effect reaching for the skies rather in the way a medieval development like San Jano in Italy again would be kind of mini skyscrapers so I don't find I don't find it surprising that in cities like Chicago which are totally flapped you have this kind of convergence of vertical buildings this is one of my favorite images so it's an excuse really to show it because I love the aircraft and the fact that it's flying along the New York grid and in the background is one of my favorite buildings which is the uh Van Allen uh Chrysler a building of 19 31 and in a way if you take these early skyscrapers they established a typology which up to relatively recently was absolutely fixed if you were going to do a skyscraper you did a Central core and you had peripheral space a kind of corridor around the core the core would contain uh the staircases the elevators the washrooms and so on and it would also act um as a structure but essentially it blocked the view it blocked the sky and um and if one kind of took that apart and you sought to reinvent the typology of a high-rise building then really what you try and do is you try and take that core out of the center and is exactly what we did on Hong Kong to split it and put it like bookends on the side so all of a sudden you've got free flexible space which is much better to look out on to capture the view and also enabled this Bank the only one of its kind to be able to put a dealer floor which needs unbroken space for good communication so it's very much about the social Dimension as well and um and talking about those reflectors in the vasby building in the Norwegian uh forest with the reflectors then that idea resurfaces here and you see that there is on the one facade there is this mirror that captures the Rays of the Sun and on the right hand side you can see the way in which it illuminates not just the main space of the banking Hall but The Pedestrian space uh below it and um and here looking down you do actually see uh the quality of Light which illuminates that and interestingly the floor of the bank becomes almost like a community center uh at the weekends and um we have since uh developed many variations on that theme and the next move was uh in Frankfurt for the commet bank instead of creating two towers to create three towers of cores and to spiral gardens around that and to relate those Gardens as lungs for the building rather like the tree that I showed at the beginning in other words the ideal building would breathe and it would work with the uh with the seasons and um and that uh is the is the building here and and the the big steps the kind of cuts into the facade where the gardens and so this is the first ecological skyscraper in the sense that it is using natural ventilation for something like 70% of the of the year and um and if those were Gardens that interrupted along the height of the of the building with a central Atrium then the next step was to explore the idea of a spiraling Garden that would go around the uh perimeter of of a building and that would be like the lungs so the spiraling lungs rather than the central Atrium again a whole series of experiments to explore the potential for the reinvention of the of the tall building and unusually uh the Pinnacle of this building does uh unlike a conventional uh tall tower where you go to the top and you find all the Machinery the equipment which drives the building here it's very much about the view about 360° Horizon and of course um the clouds and the uh and the blue above again those principles taken uh in another form a top a historic base in Manhattan the first lead accreditated uh building in New York very green uh agenda and here the core is taken again from the center and put on the outside edge and in the spirit of those daxian judic structures triangulated structures um this is saving something like 20% of Steel and uh the steel cost of Steel relates to the cost of the building and the steel is recycled so it is a very green building which sits um in a way quite gently on its side and when you're in the base it's very difficult to realize that you have the kind of monumental load of of a building above so that idea of a structure which will be very delicately related to its site probably the most extreme example of that is the cerola tower that we did in Barcelona at the time excuse me leaping all over the place there um and um and not intentional to create a kind of Space Age quality to it but the uh at least one very interesting Spanish magazine AV um from time to time has over the years picked up on the kind of analogy between space and the buildings and um and the kind of lunar uh Dimension and on the right hand one that was provoked by the Apple building which is a kind of you see as a flying sorcer um in the distance uh there and um it would be very easy to imagine that that was a kind of oneliner as a circular building but it did actually grow out of a very long period of gestation with Steve uh Steve jobs um where we questioned the very nature of a creative campus in California and um and this red line is around the site that he acquired from hulet Packard uh he had very close Association in in his early career uh with the founders of huet Packard so there was a rather nice twist that he would get this site and typically here if you could go close up to it you would see it's mostly probably about 16 or 17 buildings as individual buildings in a landscape of asphalt and and cars and uh Steve who remembered this area of catino um as being the kind of fruit basket of the United States with orchards citrus fruits and so on really wanted to capture that landscape and together the idea of a single large building but in relative terms creatively it would have everybody Under One Roof so it would be great about internal communication and um and that was evolved through deconstructing a circle creating an edge building and eventually kind of morphed into over a quite a long period many months finally emerged as this uh as this single uh building something like um the outer circumference it's probably about 1 1.6 uh kilometers it's a third of a kilometer across in terms of its Central Park but the site of 76 hectars 80% of that is Landscaping it's a Leisure pleasure uh garden and um this is how it was last week this is an upto-date uh photograph but the uh the popular press every time time this building is referred to it's always about cleared for takeoff like a spaceship spaceship spaceships liftoff for Apple Spaceship is landing um and um and I've really reflected on why that uh is and there are recurring symbolisms the space colonies that were inv visit on the right in the uh in the 70s in the early period of NASA was all about circular um and 200 whenever it was the space o odsy the kubric uh film was again that theme and Alexander gryan Bell with his wonderfully structured anticipating Buckminster Fuller and people like Barnes Wallace with his circular kites again all kind of evocative of of flight and somebody drew my attention to this recently and said did you know that catino um that the patron Sate of catino which is a small town in Italy patron saint is St Joseph and St Joseph was known for his ability to lift off and hover above the ground and here is a contemporary rendering so I think that maybe those space references um uh are rooted in something that goes back in time and spirituality so there's Joseph uh uh and a latterday Joseph here is blasting off into space and this is our project which we did in uh collaboration with the European space agency and it's how you put a habitation on the moon and the principles are that you take out to the Moon equipment that will work with the material of the Moon itself the dust the regul it's called closest you can get on Earth is volcanic dust so it takes out a 3D printing machine with liquid which is a binding age it mixes it all up together and then creates this protective environment and you can see that the airlock is the thing that arrived and carried the 3D printer and here you can see those 3D printers crawling around making new dwellings and this is truly a hostile environment I mean it's plus 100° Centigrade down to- 170° centigrade and you have to contend with flying uh meteorites uh very very small but 10 times the speed of a bullet so um so having the equipment and these uh this enclosure uh is something like a meter deep and that is informed by a study of the cellular structure of Bones so it's incredibly strong and um and the thing that uh that I found fascinating was the absolute strong connection in terms of the concept and the way in which the habitation is created with the African drone project and um and so if you're looking down on Earth from the Moon and you see Continental uh Africa um then I as I'll describe the principles are almost identical working with the material that is available you using a high technology form of transportation to take some bits together which you assemble um but instead of robots you want as many people as possible employed in the in the project and why do you want to do this well if you look at this network here 33% 1ir of the inhabitants live within 2 kilometers of an allseason Road now that's fantastic until you see what an allseason Road looks like and uh and ninda headed out a project and this was very important experience for this drone project the Drone Port project um but I haven't gone into it in detail I haven't haven't really shown it at all um but very very important lesson so here's narinda getting to his school to teach a drawing class um uh uh in um Sierra Leon and this is an allseason road you can talk about it later uh this is narinda getting to his school on the main road the main Highway and there he is so imagine that this is delivering vital medical supplies how do you shortcut how do you Le frog infrastructure if Africa is 1.2 billion people now and by 2050 it will double in size 2.2 billion um and one in four people will be African on the planet and by that 2050 177% uh excuse me 70% of humanity will be in urbanized in cities and that I think raises all kinds of interesting questions um Jonathan photographed this note about this poor child who died waiting for blood uh 6 years old and this is the hospital uh report and um and why Blood because in a year in Africa the figures are there 450,000 from malaria all blood related which 100,000 from sickle cell disease and of course this drone Network could be um could be transporting blood but it could also be transporting the vaccines which will protect protect against the sickle cell disease and it's interesting the incidence of that disease is shown by the degree of Darkness of the red and Rwanda there which is the country the one of 54 countries interestingly all those 54 countries in Africa together produce about the same amount of energy as Spain um and the 60,000 who die from uh bleeding during uh pregnancy so the concept of Redline is a drone which is a 3 meter span has a payload and that payload could deliver amongst other things but it could deliver uh 20 adult blood transfusions the blue line when you double the wingspan interestingly the payload goes up by a factor of 10 so blue line uh could deliver just like the components that made the buildings on the moon could deliver the components that enable the Drone ports to be built by local labor and creating a legacy that goes beyond um this is the lake Which is closest I think it's kibu is the name of the lake and kibui uh the nearest place which you can see there is 1.9 million people so if randa's population is 11 Point round figures 8 million then this is covering 44% of the population so this first network of three uh drone ports by 2019 will serve 44% of the country's population and you can see its relationship to the district hospitals and the um and the thickness of the line The Thin Red Lines are the uh limited range of the smaller drones and the other ones are the longer range of the of the larger drones um but um but nara's experience in Sierra Leon uh led him to I think add in with Jonathan and Jonathan's extraordinary depth of knowledge and experience of Africa to the idea that the Drone Port would not just be about drones it would be a catalyst and it would bring together a whole range of possibilities from Civic events local businesses Tech Hub post office office uh it would provide employment medical facilities obviously education School Market vaccinations counseling solar charging um so uh so very much a network in in its individual constituencies and here just to elaborate on that parallel with the uh Luna project in one case it's a robot in another case it's a Workforce it's a series of components kit of Parts which enable the local available material to be processed into a building component and here you can see the way in which the guide formwork is erected there would be templates the um the formwork itself would give the layout the mapping for lighting if that was in there um uh wiring and um and the machines which would be distributed delivered as components assembled here and this was the machine which was part of the story of the sier owned school and each one of these machines would cost $2,000 and with the binding agents they enable these individual bricks tiles to be created locally on site and then with fast drying adhesives minimum formwork they're very very beautiful shells very much if anybody uh knows others of my heroes like gustavino in New York and his extraordinary uh Creations um so this tradition of vaults which are locally made and very much of the terrain so that you when you see the color of this in the landscape it is the color of the of the landscape and um as a an earlier point right at the beginning they touch the ground very lightly so they're very permeable in terms of cross ventilation access community and um I wasn't aware of it but narinda said gave me a little story about elephants and he said he was out with a treer and they're out in the wild and the treer stopped them and said just look at you you're tiny you make all this noise now watch this elephant and the elephant goes past is absolutely silent because the elephant touches the ground lightly and the brick vault is coincidentally the same weight as the uh as the elephant so uh learning more from nature we are still exploring the shape of that uh of that grown port and um and narinda and and Johnny oops I pressed how do I do you want to come and get rid of that signal for me got it um so I conclude with their film which communicates some of the things uh that I've been talking about and gives a kind of spirit for the architecture the social agenda behind the building and um and the beauty of the drones themselves there's the ra the Land Rover stuck in the Road and this is going to do its job in one 12th of the time that stuck Land Rover down there and so here it's coming as a pilot I said why would you have tall grass on the edges of the landing strip and of course if you overrun you have a soft buffer um so uh the Landscaping is also uh is also functional and um so here you can see the Drone the Pod itself is removable and that is the brains of the Drone that's programmed for the root it takes the payload um and essentially uh probably Hightech um uh plastic skinned uh foam uh very light bringing together The Soaring abilities of a sail plane but motor assisted this could ride on thermal up currents rather like the glider that I started the uh the torque that image uh earlier it's running parallel with the with the lake it can also overfly parachute vital supplies down the modules can be smaller that's a reminder of the uh of the way in which uh the shorten time uh could very much uh save lives um with f deliveries uh not just of of blood and blue line also in terms of vital components like uh replacing damaged parts for for pumps uh providing water um the social Market Dimension and having a Civic presence on the on the skyline so more than just a utilitarian uh STS so that really concludes Jonathan's uh vision of a future Africa and um and as um uh as narinda pointed out on the way over here this is in its earlier stages and um and in very little time if this revolution takes off then the sum total of drone ports on the African continent put together would make the biggest airport in the world world look very small thank you

Channel: Archizoom EPFL

Views: 16,230

Keywords: Norman Foster, Architecture, Sky, Planes, Lecture, Architect, London, Rolex Learning Center

Id: 7yHls69X7ps

Length: 48min 6sec (2886 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 28 2015