Foster + Partners to transform the Snowdon Aviary by Cedric Price at the London Zoo

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.

Cedric Price (1934–2003) was an architect, thinker and above all an Englishman of extraordinary generosity towards his subject. He had an independence of mind the like of which can only come from a fondness for humans and a fascination for human nature. For Price, the moral and ethical principles implied in any design speculation are privileged over and above variations on the artefactual by-product. In this respect the role of the many rich collaborations over his lifetime, conversations and talks amongst audiences, engaging with the media as a means of initiating discussion, and the more personal dialogue presented in his notebooks were all critical in developing his design thinking on the themes of participation, anticipation, indeterminacy and delight. The films and drawings from Price’s personal notebooks that appear in the exhibition present Price doing what he did best over a period of 40 years – constantly challenging our understanding of what architecture might be, in discussions with students, colleagues, strangers and himself.