Norman Foster, Baron Foster of Thames Bank

Norman Robert Foster, Baron Foster of Thames Bank, (born 1 June 1935) is an English architect and designer.

Closely associated with the development of high-tech architecture, Foster is recognised as a key figure in British modernist architecture.

Norman Robert Foster was born in 1935 in Reddish, 2 mi north of Stockport, then a part of Lancashire.

He was the only child of Robert and Lilian Foster (née Smith).

The family moved to Levenshulme, near Manchester, where they lived in poverty.

His father was a machine painter at the Metropolitan-Vickers works in Trafford Park, which influenced Norman to take up engineering, design, and, ultimately, architecture.

His mother worked in a local bakery.

Foster's parents were diligent and hard workers who often had neighbours and family members look after her son, which Foster later believed restricted his relationship with his mother and father.

Foster attended Burnage Grammar School for Boys in Burnage, where he was bullied by fellow pupils and took up reading.

He considered himself quiet and awkward in his early years.

At 16, he left school and passed an entrance exam for a trainee scheme set up by Manchester Town Hall, which led to his first job, an office junior and clerk in the treasurer's department.

In 1953, Foster completed his national service in the Royal Air Force, choosing the air force because aircraft had been a longtime hobby.

Upon returning to Manchester, Foster went against his parents' wishes and sought employment elsewhere.

He had seven O-levels by this time, and applied to work at a duplicating machine company, telling the interviewer he had applied for the prospect of a company car and a £1,000 salary.

Instead, he became an assistant to a contract manager at a local architects, John E. Beardshaw and Partners.

The staff advised him that if he wished to become an architect, he should prepare a portfolio of drawings using the perspective and shop drawings from Beardshaw's practice as an example.

Beardshaw was so impressed with Foster's drawings that he promoted him to the drawing department.

In 1956 Foster began study at the School of Architecture and City Planning, part of the University of Manchester.

He was ineligible for a maintenance grant, so he took part-time jobs to fund his studies, including an ice-cream salesman, bouncer, and night shifts at a bakery making crumpets.

During this time, he also studied at the local library in Levenshulme.

His talent and hard work was recognised in 1959 when he won £105 and a RIBA silver medal for what he described as "a measured drawing of a windmill".

The windmill he drew was Bourn Windmill, Cambridgeshire.

After graduating in 1961, Foster won the Henry Fellowship to Yale School of Architecture in New Haven, Connecticut, where he met future business partner Richard Rogers and earned his master's degree.

At the suggestion of Yale art historian Vincent Scully, the pair travelled across America for a year to study architecture.

In 1963, Foster returned to the UK and established his own architectural firm Team 4, with Rogers, Su Brumwell, and the sisters Georgie and Wendy Cheesman.

Among their first projects was the Cockpit, a minimalist glass bubble installed in Cornwall, the features of which became a recurring theme in Foster's future projects.

His architectural practice Foster + Partners, first founded in 1967 as Foster Associates, is the largest in the United Kingdom, and maintains offices internationally.

He is the president of the Norman Foster Foundation, created to 'promote interdisciplinary thinking and research to help new generations of architects, designers and engineers understand how the new technology will impact their work in a more efficient and sustainable manner than traditional systems like computers or computer networks like computers or tablets and tablets and urbanists to anticipate the future'.

After the four separated in 1967, Foster and Wendy founded a new practice, Foster Associates.

From 1968 to 1983, Foster collaborated with American architect Richard Buckminster Fuller on several projects that became catalysts in the development of an environmentally sensitive approach to design, such as the Samuel Beckett Theatre at St Peter's College, Oxford.

Foster Associates concentrated on industrial buildings until 1969, when the practice worked on the administrative and leisure centre for Fred. Olsen Lines based in the London Docklands, which integrated workers and managers within the same office space.

This was followed, in 1970, by the world's first inflatable office building for Computer Technology Limited near Hemel Hempstead, which housed 70 employees for a year.

The practice's breakthrough project in England followed in 1974 with the completion of the Willis Faber & Dumas headquarters in Ipswich, commissioned in 1970 and completed in 1975.

The client, a family-run insurance company, wanted to restore a sense of community to the workplace.

In response, Foster designed a space with modular, open plan office floors, long before open-plan became the norm, and placed a roof garden, 25-metre swimming pool, and gymnasium in the building to enhance the quality of life for the company's 1,200 employees.

The building has a full-height glass façade moulded to the medieval street plan and contributes drama, subtly shifting from opaque, reflective black to a glowing back-lit transparency as the sun sets.

The design was inspired by the Daily Express Building in Manchester that Foster had admired as a youngster.

The building is now Grade I listed.

Foster was awarded the Pritzker Prize in 1999.

The foundation, which opened in June 2017, is based in Madrid and operates globally.