Norman Foster Exhibition

Norman Foster Exhibition

10th May – 7th August 2023

Pompidou Centre Paris

For a milestone birthday the practice has very generously brought me a trip to Paris to see the ‘Norman Foster’ exhibition in the Pompidou Centre.?

With the exhibition being set in Gallerie 1 on the top floor of the Pompidou, you are first treated to escalator trip up the outside of the building revealing the spectacular vista over the rooftops Haussmann’s Paris articulated Notre Dame, the Eiffel Tower and Sacre-Coeur.

You enter the 2,200m2 exhibition into the Drawing Gallery, with sketches and drawings taking you from teenage years (to have kept them as well) to contemporary work. To see so many of the buildings we know so well at this early stage in the design process was fascinating. The sheer quantity is quite bewildering and my favourite room.

Note to self, draw more.

The last in the gallery spaces dedicates itself to ‘The Future’ which after an interview looks to illustrate the ideas. A number of reviews have been very critical about this ‘future vision’, with a proposal to use nuclear power to provide clean energy to enable further technological development. The adjacent room includes a proposal on the moon which is used to illustrate this potential future and whilst technically possible looked more like dystopia rather than utopia and did not feel as though it supported Fosters claim that ‘I?still believe that the future will be better than the past.’

That aside the exhibition is breath taking walking through the themed spaces there are countless projects you have been brought up with, many you have used or visited. From the small retreat, the Cockpit designed with Team 4, a scheme that I studied avidly as a student to others that have links and influences to our own practice. Willis Faber Dumas is a contemporary building with Thorn Croft Manor office (https://www.manser.co.uk/project/thorn-croft-manor/) that was delivered at the same time with many similar ideas. Jonathan Manser, our CEO, worked at Foster & Partners on Willis Faber and other projects. The iconic Sainsbury’s Centre went on to influence our Heathrow T4 Hotel (https://www.manser.co.uk/project/heathrow-hilton/) and Foster wrote very fondly of our founder Michael Manser in a tribute to him when he passed away in 2016.

“For me there were many unforgettable moments with Michael. Once he called me out of the blue to say he would be launching a design for a new hotel near Heathrow and that in part it was inspired by the Sainsbury Centre. He expressed the hope that I was OK about the association. I responded that, on the contrary, I was absolutely delighted with the link and that it could not be better.”

AJ April 2016

In turn having looked round the exhibition it feels as though Foster’s Hotel de Ville in Buenos Aires (2014) makes reference to our British High Commission building in Dar-Es-Salem (2001 - https://www.manser.co.uk/project/british-high-commission-dar-es-sallam/) with its waving roof over staggered floor plates and central atrium.

Coming back to the more difficult theme of the Future and ‘what does a sustainable future look like?’ for architecture is a question we are all trying to grapple with.?There will be technological solutions but an equilibrium has to be the panacea, using less, ideally replacing and recycling what we use, so we leave having used no more than we started with. How you achieve this is a different matter.