Norman Foster Foundation receives the 2018 Gold Medal for Merit in the Fine Arts

The Norman Foster Foundation receives the 2018 Gold Medal for Merit In the Fine Arts proposed by the Spanish Ministry of Culture and Granted by the Council of Ministers.

Showroom. Photography © Claudio Álvarez. Image courtesy of Norman Foster Foundation

The Gold Medal for Merit in the Fine Arts is an award granted by the Spanish Ministry of Culture and Sports to individuals and institutions from the world of culture, to recognize those who have excelled in the arts or have served to promote the arts. Previous recipients include Juan Miró, Salvador Dalí, Plácido Domingo, Luis Buñuel, Cristina Iglesias and the Guggenheim Museum of Bilbao.

The Norman Foster Foundation is a non-profit body which is headquartered in Madrid but operates globally. It promotes interdisciplinary thinking and research to help new generations of architects, designers, engineers, urbanists and artists to anticipate the future. Its recent focus has been on issues of the cities, climate change, artificial intelligence and robotics.

Lord Foster, President of the Norman Foster Foundation, speaking on behalf of its Trustees, Honorary Trustees, the Advisory Board and all members of the team, would like to express his gratitude for this prestigious award. He would also like to thank the individuals, institutions and entities for their generous support and encouragement of the Foundation, its missions, archive, educational programmes and projects.

Norman Foster Foundation by José Manuel Ballester. Photograph © José Manuel Ballester. Courtesy Norman Foster Foundation

View of Library, whose donors include Yale University Press, El Croquis, the Canadian Center for Architecture and Lars Müller Publishers, among others. Norman Foster Foundation by José Manuel Ballester. Photograph © José Manuel Ballester. Courtesy Norman Foster Foundation

Rear view of car and plane models that line the wets wall of the Pavilion. Norman Foster Foundation by José Manuel Ballester. Photograph © José Manuel Ballester. Courtesy Norman Foster Foundation

The Pavillion. Norman Foster Foundation. Photograph © Luis Asín.

Sir Norman Foster. Image courtesy of Norman Foster Foundation

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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.

Norman Foster Foundation

Norman Foster Foundation was founded in London in 1999, and headquartered in Madrid since 2017. It promotes interdisciplinary thinking and research to help new generations anticipate the future. Central to its work is Norman Foster’s enduring philosophy that architecture, infrastructure and urbanism directly impact the quality of our lives as new cities are created and existing ones evolve. Since its launch, the Foundation’s educational programmes— comprising workshops, forums and fellowships —have encouraged new thinking and research to help future civic leaders prepare for the challenges they will face, based on data rather than fashion. Those programmes and principles led to the creation of the Norman Foster Institute which launched its first Master’s Course on Sustainable Cities in January 2024.

The Foundation is also home to the Norman Foster Archive and part of his Library, which provides a window into the larger narrative and history of our built environment through the work of Norman Foster and other prominent architects. The Archive is an open online resource and contributes to exhibitions worldwide. The education programmes and research teams are supported by the Foundation’s in-house architectural team. The work of the Foundation is shared with a wider audience through the books and reports created by the Norman Foster Foundation publications team.

The Norman Foster Foundation is the recipient of various awards and was recognised as a Centre of Excellence by the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) in 2021. The Foundation is headquartered in Madrid and operates globally.

Published on: December 31, 2018

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