Conversations with Norman Foster. Arquía Foundation Masters Series

Following the first publication of the first episode of the Maestros Series - a conversation with Renzo Piano - Fundación Arquia launches Conversations with Norman Foster, a documentary that offers a deep and intimate look of one of the most charismatic and most famous architects of our time: Norman Foster.

The production included two shootings, one at the Foundation's headquarters in Madrid, Spain and the other at the Norman Foster + Partners Studio in London, England. Video-makers had the opportunity to make a documentary fascinating from its beginning: because them given access to the huge archive of documents, drawings, models and objects found in both locations.

Shot of the filming. ‘Conversaciones con Norman Foster’, image courtesy of Fundación Arquia.

Maestros is a video collection conceived and published by Fundación Arquia. The collection consists of a series of interviews which run through the careers of some of the greatest names in international architecture. Each interview can see as a standalone piece or as part of the wider collection. The aim is that outstanding masters of our time can personally convey their thoughts and visions to future generations.

The project rethinked the way in which to communicate this series kind, reproducing the collection for digital via video rather than television so that it could be disseminated further and shared by social media users. Each film is aligned with a microsite and supporting interactive booklet with additional information about the architect’s life and works.

Conversations with Norman Foster visits Foster & Partners talks with the architect about his life, his approach to architecture, as well as the stories behind the buildings.

The first documentary in the series was dedicated to the architect Renzo Piano and the third will be with Peter Eisenman, which Fundación Arquia will launch in the coming months.

A biographical journey

The interviews, conducted by Luis Fernández-Galiano, follow scripts with a set structure: a conversation divided into six parts chronologically spanning the career of each master. The introduction, covering the period up until their architectural training, is followed by five sections that use their constructed work as a common thread, highlighting three projects in each section as milestones along a biographical journey.

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Label

Credits of the documentary Conversations with Norman Foster

Text

A program by Fundación Arquia.
Produced by White Horse
Narrative and Art Direction Folch
Photography.- Andy Donohoe

NORMAN FOSTER

Norman Foster is considered by many to be the most prominent architect in Britain. He won the 1999 Pritzker Architecture Prize and the 2009 Príncipe de Asturias de las Artes Prize.

Lord Foster rebuilt the Reichstag as a new German Parliament in Berlin and designed a contemporary Great Court for the British Museum. He linked St. Paul's Cathedral to the Tate Modern with the Millennium Bridge, a steel footbridge across the Thames. He designed the Hearst Corporation Building in Manhattan, at 57th Street and Eighth Avenue.

He was born in Manchester, England, in 1935. Among his firm’s many other projects are London’s City Hall, the Bilbao Metro in Spain, the Canary Wharf Underground Station in London and the renovated courtyard of the Smithsonian American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery in Washington.

In the 1970s, Lord Foster was one of the most visible practitioners of high-tech architecture that fetishized machine culture. His triumphant 1986 Hong Kong and Shanghai bank building, conceived as a kit-of-parts plugged into a towering steel frame, was capitalism's answer to the populist Pompidou Center in Paris.

Nicolai Ouroussoff, The Times’s architecture critic, has written that although Lord Foster’s work has become sleeker and more predictable in recent years, his forms are always driven by an internal structural logic, and they treat their surroundings with a refreshing bluntness.

Awarded the Prince of Asturias of the Arts 2009.

Published on: December 13, 2019

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