Centre Pompidou will host, from 10 May to 7 August, 2023, the largest retrospective exhibition spanning the entire Norman Foster’s work. The exhibition recalls how, throughout the decades, Foster has sought to "challenge conventions, reinvent building types and demonstrate an architecture of light and lightness, inspired by nature, which can be about joy as well as being eco-friendly".

Designed by Norman Foster and executed in collaboration with Foster + Partners and the Norman Foster Foundation, the public display reviews the different periods of the architect’s work, highlighting seminal projects, such as the headquarters of the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation (Hong Kong, 1979-1986), the Carré d’Art (Nîmes, 1984-1993), Hong Kong International Airport (1992-1998) and Apple Park (Cupertino, United States, 2009-2017).
The exhibition explores the architect’s work through the prism of seven themes: Nature and Urbanity; Skin and Bones; Vertical City; History and Tradition; Planning and Place; Networks and Mobility and Future. Drawings, sketches, original scale models and dioramas, along with many videos, will enable visitors to delve into 130 major projects.

Welcoming visitors at the entrance to the exhibition, a drawing gallery showcases items never seen before in France, consisting of drawings, sketchbooks, sketches and photographs taken by the architect. Illustrating a resonance with Foster’s architecture, the display includes works by Fernand Léger, Constantin Brancusi, Umberto Boccioni and Ai Weiwei, along with industrial creations, such as a glider and several classic automobiles, which have often served as sources of inspiration.


Drawing for Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts by Norman Foster, 1978.

The largest retrospective spanning the entire oeuvre of Norman Foster’s work over the last six decades will open at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in May this year.

Covering nearly 2,200 square metres, the exhibition reviews the different periods of the architect’s work, highlighting seminal projects.

Norman Foster, Founder and Executive Chairman, Foster + Partners and President, Norman Foster Foundation:

"This exhibition traces the themes of sustainability and anticipating the future. The birth of the practice in the 1960s coincided with the first signs of an awareness of the fragility of the planet. These were the green shoots of what would later be named The Green Movement. These principles may now be mainstream but more than half a century ago they were revolutionary and anticipated the reality of today. Throughout the decades we have sought to challenge conventions, reinvent building types and demonstrate an architecture of light and lightness, inspired by nature, which can be about joy as well as being eco-friendly."


Hearst Headquarters, 2006. Photograph by Chuck Choi.

The exhibition explores the architect’s work through the prism of seven themes: Nature and Urbanity; Skin and Bones; Vertical City; History and Tradition; Planning and Place; Networks and Mobility and Future. Drawings, sketches, original scale models and dioramas, along with many videos, will enable visitors to delve into 130 major projects.

Welcoming visitors at the entrance to the exhibition, a drawing gallery showcases items never seen before in France, consisting of drawings, sketchbooks, sketches and photographs taken by the architect. Illustrating a resonance with Foster’s architecture, the display includes works by Fernand Léger, Constantin Brancusi, Umberto Boccioni and Ai Weiwei, along with industrial creations, such as a glider and several classic automobiles, which have often served as sources of inspiration.

A 264-page catalogue accompanies the exhibition, presenting the architect’s work through the prism of eighty of his most significant projects. This monograph features three portfolios that showcase the early sources of inspiration for projects conducted in collaboration with Richard Buckminster Fuller, along with other drawings and sketches. This collective volume is published by Éditions du Centre Pompidou, under the direction of Frédéric Migayrou, curator of the exhibition.

The "Norman Foster" exhibition is being organised by the Centre Pompidou, with the collaboration of Foster + Partners and the Norman Foster Foundation.

More information

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Exhibition design
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Designed by Norman Foster and executed in collaboration with Foster + Partners and the Norman Foster Foundation.
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Area
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2,200 square-metres.
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10 May - 7 August 2023.
11h - 21h, every mondays, wednesdays, fridays, saturdays, sundays.
11h - 23h, every thursdays.
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Venue / Adress
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Galerie 1, Level 6. Centre Pompidou, Place Georges-Pompidou, 75004 Paris, France.
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Financing
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Bloomberg, J.P. Morgan, JCDecaux, SHVO, Goppion, Empty, Hearst Corporation
Frontiers, Bodegas Faustino, ACCIONA.
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G.A.I,  POHL / New Hudson Facades, Waagner Biro, Linda Cheung and Flossie Chang.
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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.

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Published on: March 12, 2023
Cite: "Largest Norman Foster retrospective in Centre Pompidou" METALOCUS. Accessed
<http://www.metalocus.es/en/news/largest-norman-foster-retrospective-centre-pompidou> ISSN 1139-6415
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