THE Thames looms large on the horizon, an olive-green canvas that fills the view from the huge glass windows at Foster + Partners. It is to the river and the pockets of trees beyond it that Norman Foster turns—his eyes so mobile that it’s hard to tell their colour—to reveal London’s DNA, that series of individual villages and green spaces that have morphed into a city. ‘London is essentially organic. It’s not gridded on a right angle, like New York. It’s not on grand axes like Paris; it has this meandering river, which is as meandering as the organic communities I’m talking about.’
For him, designing London buildings means responding to this informality, to the city’s long history. To explain, he compares the pink confection of the Albert Bridge, which bookends the east side of his practice’s building, with the Millennium Bridge, a thin silvery rope launched across the Thames on the trepidant dawn of this millennium to link a then-resurgent Southbank to the grandeur of St Paul’s. Both are suspension bridges, but where the gracefully ornate Albert ‘has an amazing presence—it’s a statement about the river, a statement about the bridge’, its millennial counterpart, placed to defer to Wren’s cathedral, is the lowest suspension
