Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio News.
Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Thoughts Podcast.
Speaker 2: I'm Tracy Alloway and I'm Joe.
Speaker 3: Why isn't Joe?
Speaker 2: You know? I spend a lot of my time doing
Speaker 2: interior design. Yes, I've bored you, I'm sure, with a
Speaker 2: lot of thoughts on this topic. But then it struck
Speaker 2: me recently that actually what I'm doing is not really
Speaker 2: interior design. It's actually just interior decorating because I'm not
Speaker 2: really changing the structure of a particular house. I don't
Speaker 2: like doing that, in part because I'm lazy and I
Speaker 2: hate construction mess, but also because it's a lot harder
Speaker 2: to change the particular design of a house than it
Speaker 2: is to just get new fabric for the windows or
Speaker 2: a new paint color. There are more real world constraints.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I can confirm having looked over from time to time,
Speaker 4: you know, when they sit next to each other. I
Speaker 4: can confirm having you looked at you, say, like looking
Speaker 4: out wallpaper and vintage wallpaper that you might be acquiring.
Speaker 4: But no, I have not heard of you sort of
Speaker 4: talk about, you know, knocking down big walls or whatever
Speaker 4: inside your home. Although I certainly. You know in New
Speaker 4: York City, you know people who do that and they
Speaker 4: hire an architect as part of They'll buy two condos
Speaker 4: or something like that and can join them and hire
Speaker 4: an architect and so forth. That's a different level. It's
Speaker 4: a different level of constraints and obligations.
Speaker 2: Well, this is the other thing I've been thinking. Am
Speaker 2: I a product of my time? Because so much of
Speaker 2: the cultural emphasis nowadays seems to be on interior design
Speaker 2: and what the inside of a building looks like versus
Speaker 2: the exterior. And I think if I had been do
Speaker 2: you know, thinking about these things in like the nineties
Speaker 2: or the eighties, I would be much more into architecture.
Speaker 4: It's really interesting thought. And I hadn't really thought of
Speaker 4: it that way, But that makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 4: And you know, my uninformed gut is like, oh, does
Speaker 4: social media make it? Other people are just much more
Speaker 4: obsessed with the interior design of a building, the specific
Speaker 4: esthetic choices that are made. But of course, on the
Speaker 4: other hand, we work at Bloomberg. We have a big
Speaker 4: office in.
Speaker 2: London, many beautiful buildings.
Speaker 4: Many beautiful buildings, lots of glass New London HQ, absolutely
Speaker 4: gorgeous building et cetera. And so we do live surrounded
Speaker 4: in this world that the world we live in is
Speaker 4: one that was built by architects or designed by architects.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, And this was the other thing I was thinking
Speaker 2: about architecture in relation to economics is when it's done well,
Speaker 2: a beautiful building ends up being a public good. Right.
Speaker 2: It can boost an entire neighborhood, it can revive a
Speaker 2: particular city, it can improve the flow of traffic, improve
Speaker 2: energy efficiency, do all these things. But so many buildings
Speaker 2: are still designed by private developers, and I'm not sure
Speaker 2: they're always incentivized to do beautiful design in that way. Like,
Speaker 2: how do you incentivize a private develop to do something
Speaker 2: that ends up being a public good.
Speaker 4: It's a fascinating question. I hadn't really thought of it
Speaker 4: framed in that. But like, for example, again, like the
Speaker 4: new JP Morgan building in New York City.
Speaker 2: I like it.
Speaker 4: I don't I don't work there, but I think it's
Speaker 4: like a cool addition the skyline, it blinks, et cetera.
Speaker 4: There's a lot of cool things, But how do you
Speaker 4: design how do you incentivize the public good as a
Speaker 4: good way to frame it?
Speaker 2: Well, since you mentioned the JP Morgan building that is
Speaker 2: a bit perfect, Yes, a huge clue. So we do,
Speaker 2: in fact have the perfect guest for today's show. We
Speaker 2: are going to be speaking to a very famous architect,
Speaker 2: Lord Norman Foster. He is of course the founder of
Speaker 2: Foster and Partners, and we are here with him in Madrid.
Speaker 4: In uh in his studio and his foundation.
Speaker 2: Thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank
Speaker 2: you so How much of architecture is about dealing with
Speaker 2: real world constraints because I always think there's not just
Speaker 2: physics and finance, but you're also dealing with things like
Speaker 2: zoning and I guess in the UK you're also dealing
Speaker 2: with listing requirements and things like that. How much does
Speaker 2: that constrain you.
Speaker 3: It's totally rooted in the process of design, so you
Speaker 3: cannot separate. Design is really a response to constraints and
Speaker 3: whether those constraints come from the codes, whether they come
Speaker 3: from the requirements for the building. Because a building is
Speaker 3: a response to a need, it then takes on more layers. Yes,
Speaker 3: it's in the public domain, but it's shaped by constraints,
Speaker 3: by needs. It's a response. So if you don't have
Speaker 3: those constraints, if you don't have those demands if you
Speaker 3: don't have to meet certain requirements performance. Some of those
Speaker 3: are tangible, you can measure them. Some are less obvious,
Speaker 3: more subconscious, perhaps below the surface, but nonetheless. So it's
Speaker 3: a design is a response to needs.
Speaker 4: We're in this gorgeous building of yours, and we were
Speaker 4: just looking that you know, over there on the show
Speaker 4: of Dirt for a series of wood samples, for example,
Speaker 4: different types of wood from different ustry.
Speaker 2: Wood plumb would at.
Speaker 4: The highest levels of architecture to do a great building.
Speaker 4: How much do you does the architect really need to know?
Speaker 4: I guess maybe material science, or at least the true
Speaker 4: nature of specific materials.
Speaker 3: I think the more that you know about the issues
Speaker 3: around any assignment, the more you're empowered as a designer.
Speaker 3: So that has led me over decades to promote a
Speaker 3: particular way of designing, which is counterintuitive. It's against everything
Speaker 3: that we're taught in a school of architecture or engineering,
Speaker 3: and that is you bring all the disciplines to get
Speaker 3: around a table and you work from the outset together. Now,
Speaker 3: a critic of that will say that sounds like a
Speaker 3: committee architecture. It's not. I mean, basically, the team is
Speaker 3: going to be involved in that project. So if the
Speaker 3: architect designs and then hands it over to the engineer
Speaker 3: to make it stand up, to make it hot when
Speaker 3: it's cold outside, and the reverse, you lose the opportunity
Speaker 3: of the feedback. If you get that at the outset,
Speaker 3: the designers are more empowered and the designers are really
Speaker 3: a wider team. But that needs a process of re education.
Speaker 3: Because engineers have been taught show me what you want,
Speaker 3: I'll make it work. Architects have been taught that they
Speaker 3: should design in isolation. It goes further. Architects are taught
Speaker 3: about doing a building in isolation. A city outside is
Speaker 3: a street. You could argue the street is the essence
Speaker 3: of the traditional city. Architects and urbanists are not talked
Speaker 3: about designing streets. So planners are taught in terms of zoning,
Speaker 3: in terms of the legalities, architects have talked about individual buildings.
Speaker 3: So in a way, we have to reassess how we
Speaker 3: educate and in our terms we re educate whether it's
Speaker 3: here in a foundation preparing civic leaders for the future,
Speaker 3: enabling them to be able to tell the difference between fashion, prejudice,
Speaker 3: style and data and evidence and the same is true
Speaker 3: in terms of a building or a city plan.
Speaker 2: Joe brought up the wood samples. I can't help but
Speaker 2: notice that the majority of items in this room are
Speaker 2: related to transportations, so cars and jets and trains as well.
Speaker 2: I also read the city and the city, but I
Speaker 2: also read in an older interview, I think someone asked
Speaker 2: you your favorite building and you replied a jumbo jet.
Speaker 2: Do you have an interest in engineering? Should you have
Speaker 2: been an engineer instead of an architect?
Speaker 3: I love flight, I love automobiles, and I think that
Speaker 3: as designers we get our inspirations from many different directions.
Speaker 3: I was deliberately being tongue in cheek in terms of
Speaker 3: the jumper jet, but what I really wanted to do
Speaker 3: was to get the audience thinking in a different way
Speaker 3: about a jumper because when you think about it, it's
Speaker 3: a restaurant, it's a cinema, it's a hotel, and all
Speaker 3: the while it's moving from one place to the other.
Speaker 3: And also to start to think about the miracle flight.
Speaker 3: I mean, there's still an extraordinary magic that these machines,
Speaker 3: which are weighing tons, can somehow, by lumbering along the runway,
Speaker 3: suddenly levitate and then transports vast distances. And I think
Speaker 3: there are also a lot of lessons in terms of
Speaker 3: the built world, in other words, how can we use
Speaker 3: harness technology to improve the quality of life.
Speaker 4: I'm really fascinated by this idea of Okay, so one
Speaker 4: might think that an architect is someone who draws clients
Speaker 4: draws sketches on a piece of paper, and then maybe
Speaker 4: there is an engineering firm, and then there's a construction firm,
Speaker 4: and then so forth. I'm fascinated by this idea, and
Speaker 4: it rings true with other discussions we have. You know,
Speaker 4: we talk to traders, for example, and there's obviously a
Speaker 4: difference between thinking in your head and a good trade
Speaker 4: versus what it actually takes.
Speaker 2: Time.
Speaker 3: Literally, this morning, I was sitting around a table with
Speaker 3: a group of us as architects here in the foundation
Speaker 3: on a project, alongside the individual who would be going
Speaker 3: to build that building, and we're saying, well, the next
Speaker 3: stage is to do this, we really have to have
Speaker 3: the environmental engineer, we have to have this structural engineer,
Speaker 3: and that will be the next meeting. So that was
Speaker 3: the first meeting. Now we were able to go so far,
Speaker 3: but only so far, and we recognize the need to
Speaker 3: have those other skills on board. Now we could have
Speaker 3: and it would have been absolutely traditional. We could adjust
Speaker 3: collectively designed that building and then just passed it on,
Speaker 3: But there would be so many lost opportunities because if
Speaker 3: you think of a building as an integration of systems,
Speaker 3: I mean if I I tried to bring this back
Speaker 3: to the world of automotive design, and I found myself
Speaker 3: trying to communicate that this principle to a group of
Speaker 3: automotive engineers, not just the engineers, but those who were
Speaker 3: making the cars. And the example that I took was
Speaker 3: a point in time in the nineteen thirties went pretty well.
Speaker 3: All of the cars, any production car followed a certain pattern.
Speaker 3: It was a chassis and then a body on top
Speaker 3: of that, which was a shell to enclose and protect
Speaker 3: the occupants from the rain, the elements from nature. And
Speaker 3: then at one point a car emerged it was the
Speaker 3: Chrysler Airflow, and the body became not just a shell,
Speaker 3: it became an integral part of the structure. So the
Speaker 3: car was lighter and the car was immensely stronger. The
Speaker 3: promotional video of that time they pushed the car off
Speaker 3: the top of the mountain, and it kind of rolled
Speaker 3: and rolled and landed four square. Somebody comes out of
Speaker 3: the bushes, demonstrates that the opens the door, gets in
Speaker 3: and drives away. The point is then that the two
Speaker 3: separate systems of the shell and the chassis have merged
Speaker 3: into one element, which is doing both jobs better. So
Speaker 3: it's doing more with less. Now imagine that we're talking
Speaker 3: about the exterior of a building, heating and cooling it.
Speaker 3: If you think of integrated design, then you're going to
Speaker 3: end up if all those skills are working together, you
Speaker 3: can really do a system approach to design. You can
Speaker 3: start to get things doing duty, performing more less components,
Speaker 3: higher performance, more quality, and better quality of life. Whether
Speaker 3: that principle, whether it's in a city or a building,
Speaker 3: is all of that is to a social end.
Speaker 2: How do you think about the social end of buildings
Speaker 2: when you're given a particular project. So I know that
Speaker 2: you often do public buildings, and I imagine that you
Speaker 2: are in dialogue with cities and states around the world
Speaker 2: when you're doing those. But when you're given a private
Speaker 2: assignment such as a JP Morgan building or a Bloomberg office,
Speaker 2: how do you think about the public good aspect?
Speaker 3: Of design, thinking simultaneously of how that building works from
Speaker 3: the inside out, and you're also thinking simultaneously from the
Speaker 3: outside inn because arguably there are two completely separate groups
Speaker 3: of people private inside public outside, but the building is
Speaker 3: in the public domain. So if I took the headquarters
Speaker 3: of Bloomberg, then an early decision was to intersect the
Speaker 3: building with Wattling Street. Watling Street was the old Roman
Speaker 3: road opposite. If you acknowledged that, and you continued that
Speaker 3: and it became an arcade through the building and you
Speaker 3: had connectivity over that arcade, then simultaneously you were breaking
Speaker 3: down the scale of the building. It was then more
Speaker 3: human and the public spaces bringing in an artist to
Speaker 3: create water benches. That was also double duty the system's
Speaker 3: approach providing security, but it wasn't an ugly bollard you
Speaker 3: didn't notice providing security. It was also bringing people together.
Speaker 3: Then the arcade is an opportunity to introduce shops and
Speaker 3: stuff that is working with the Bloomberg philosophy of encouraging
Speaker 3: the neighborhood to benefit from this private entity coming into
Speaker 3: the community, rather than it being an island and killing
Speaker 3: off the traders. It's encouraging local traders. Now, everything I've
Speaker 3: described then is working to the benefit of the interior
Speaker 3: of the building, and the facades are starting to be
Speaker 3: able to breathe and pour lots of fresh air into
Speaker 3: the building. So it's making the building a healthier building.
Speaker 3: But it's also on the exterior, not another glass box.
Speaker 3: It's a combination of bronze and the local stone, local stone,
Speaker 3: the stone of the adjoining buildings. So it's working environmentally
Speaker 3: in terms of sustainability, it's reducing energy, it's creating a
Speaker 3: healthier building for the occupants. And then because it's deep
Speaker 3: and low, it's not pushing into the sky, so it
Speaker 3: is reverential to the historic buildings around it of the
Speaker 3: same mass. But at the same time it's creating horizontality,
Speaker 3: and horizontality is good for communication, and Bloomberg is about communication.
Speaker 3: Now I could describe another kind of building for a
Speaker 3: completely different kind of how can I say, client body
Speaker 3: also in the high tech business, so if I go
Speaker 3: to Beijing, if I talk about a building there, the
Speaker 3: company ethos is totally different. It's about competition between groups,
Speaker 3: so it's the poll opposite, and I could describe that. Indeed,
Speaker 3: the point that I'm making is that as I take
Speaker 3: you through these decisions, the way that they overlap and interact,
Speaker 3: you start to realize that the process of design is
Speaker 3: about balancing, it's about reconciling. It's about creating something which
Speaker 3: is simultaneously working in the public domain, working for a visitor,
Speaker 3: working for those inside when they come outside.
Speaker 4: Well, since you alluded to it, and now I'm particularly
Speaker 4: particularly curious about it, I imagine that in the decades ahead,
Speaker 4: you know, there will still be new JP Morgan headquarters,
Speaker 4: new Bloomberg headquarters, et cetera, but there is probably going
Speaker 4: to be a lot more megaprojects still coming out of
Speaker 4: Asia or Beijing or China specifically. And so when you
Speaker 4: describe that environment is different, what should the architects of
Speaker 4: the future know about working in these markets?
Speaker 3: First of all, I mean I took the example of
Speaker 3: the building in China. That same need could be anywhere,
Speaker 3: it just happened to be in China. So you could
Speaker 3: have in China exactly the same requirements as a building
Speaker 3: like JP Morgan or Bloomberg, although of course no two
Speaker 3: buildings are like. I mean, each is specific to its
Speaker 3: own organization. The values of those organizations, the aspirations of
Speaker 3: those who've created them, whether they're an individual like Mike
Speaker 3: Bloomberg in Bloomberg, whether it's Steve Jobs with Apple, or
Speaker 3: whether it's much more corporate, more anonymous, But nonetheless there
Speaker 3: are those values. I would say that common to any
Speaker 3: building anywhere is how do you anticipate the future? So
Speaker 3: if I go back to an early building which recently
Speaker 3: celebrated its half century, and that was the Willis Faber
Speaker 3: Building in Ipswich and insurance headquarters. And in the life
Speaker 3: of that building, that building had a high degree of flexibility,
Speaker 3: and nobody in their wildest dreams anticipated that that flexibility
Speaker 3: would be used. But in no time at all after
Speaker 3: it opened, it opened with typewriters, and in no time
Speaker 3: that building, and it was the only building in the
Speaker 3: insurance industry which was as a headquarters able to adapt.
Speaker 3: It adapted to the digital revelu to screens. And the
Speaker 3: same was true of the Hong Kong Bank, the Hong
Speaker 3: Kong Bank, which I also recently went to their fortieth
Speaker 3: anniversary as opposed to Willis Favor and their fiftieth anniversary,
Speaker 3: so literally a few weeks ago, I was there at
Speaker 3: that celebration and the same thing there. That building, quite
Speaker 3: radical at the time and still in many ways radical.
Speaker 3: Took the traditional central core of a tower, which contained
Speaker 3: the structure, the vertical circulation, the bathroom's mechanical plant, took
Speaker 3: all that fragmented it put it at the sides of big,
Speaker 3: open loft things. Nobody anticipated that in the life of
Speaker 3: that building, in the early life, there would be something
Speaker 3: known as a trading floor, where you need clear line
Speaker 3: of sight. That wasn't a need in the nineteen late
Speaker 3: nineteen seventies when the competition for that building, but it
Speaker 3: was able to absorb. So I think that the whole
Speaker 3: thing about the future is that by design you can,
Speaker 3: if I say that, you create a building for the
Speaker 3: needs of today with an awareness of the past, but
Speaker 3: to as far as you're able to anticipate the future,
Speaker 3: which is largely unknown. But the perhaps in terms of
Speaker 3: infrastructure having been backwards and forwards to Asia, and if
Speaker 3: I say China more specifically over the last thirty years,
Speaker 3: I mean the changes that I've seen, which interestingly I
Speaker 3: was communicating earlier this week to the Bloomberg event audience
Speaker 3: here and sharing that experience with them and showing them
Speaker 3: the China when I first went there and it's foggy,
Speaker 3: it's misty, you can't see the cities now unbelievable, I
Speaker 3: mean clean air, ninety percent of the vehicles electric, and
Speaker 3: an extraordinary amount of green. I mean Shanghai is fifty percent,
Speaker 3: Beijing fifty percent green. That's happened over the last few decades.
Speaker 3: And in terms of connectivity, just over fifty four thousand
Speaker 3: kilometers of high speed train two hundred and twenty miles
Speaker 3: an hour, three hundred and fifty kilometers an hour connecting.
Speaker 3: By this, ninety seven percent of Chinese cities on a
Speaker 3: pig day, thirteen million travelers achieved in sixteen years. And
Speaker 3: in the UK they gave up on the London to Manchester.
Speaker 3: It goes as far as Birmingham. Short term ism. They
Speaker 3: have a department for leveling up. The ultimate leveling up
Speaker 3: is connectivity. They just didn't get it. And that fifty
Speaker 3: four thousand kilometers is more than the rest of the
Speaker 3: world put together by a huge margin.
Speaker 2: Why do you think certain countries And you brought up
Speaker 2: the UK there, but you could possibly say the same
Speaker 2: for the US as well. Why do you think certain
Speaker 2: countries big?
Speaker 3: Because at every stage in the emergence, the emergence of
Speaker 3: a nation, whether that is the United Kingdom in its
Speaker 3: empire days, the Industrial Revolution. It led the world. We're
Speaker 3: still trading right now on that. I mean, the Thames
Speaker 3: Embankment was a response to cholera. It created, if you like,
Speaker 3: systems thinking and doing more with less. It also introduced
Speaker 3: below ground high speed public transport. It cleaned up the Thames.
Speaker 3: So that period you had the expression of that civic
Speaker 3: pride I started. I started work at the age of
Speaker 3: sixteen in Manchester Town Hall, which was the ultimate statement
Speaker 3: of civic pride. And it was a competition and Waterhouse
Speaker 3: won that competition. That was my first experience of architecture.
Speaker 3: It took me a little longer to eventually discover that
Speaker 3: I could study architecture. So I was a late starter
Speaker 3: at the age of twenty one. But I can remember
Speaker 3: vividly right now details of that building. I mean, that
Speaker 3: really lifted my spirit. So that whether it was the
Speaker 3: great train stations, and of course today it's the great airports.
Speaker 3: So if you really want to see that the most
Speaker 3: advanced airports in the world, where do you go? I mean,
Speaker 3: it's obvious we know where you go.
Speaker 2: Right there's a mockup.
Speaker 3: There's a huge model immediately behind us here. The Basing
Speaker 3: Airport was built in five years now. At the same
Speaker 3: time I drew a parallel with Terminal five, which I
Speaker 3: think took twenty years and was the fraction of the
Speaker 3: size and is really a sort of band aid on
Speaker 3: top of Heathrow, which is still embedded in the heart
Speaker 3: of you overfly metropolis together. So there are a lot
Speaker 3: of messages perhaps mixed up in these analogies and comparisons.
Speaker 4: No, it makes sense, and I didn't necessarily expect the
Speaker 4: interview to go in dis direction. But I'm actually just
Speaker 4: going to press you further on this specific point, which is,
Speaker 4: what is your diagnosis of why certain countries do seem
Speaker 4: to have given up? Was there a moment when you
Speaker 4: felt it, for example, in the UK, was there a
Speaker 4: moment where you felt the ambition is not the same
Speaker 4: as it once worth.
Speaker 3: It's interesting. I'm working on a project right now, and
Speaker 3: so I'm with a team of relatively young architects, and
Speaker 3: so I'm saying, well, in terms of domes, of course,
Speaker 3: it would be interesting to make a comparison with a
Speaker 3: particular dome in the Festival of Britain nineteen fifty one,
Speaker 3: and everybody looked at me quizzically and I said, but
Speaker 3: you've never heard of it, because nobody ever heard of it.
Speaker 3: So I said, well, check it out and the next
Speaker 3: meeting will talk about it. The next meeting they came
Speaker 3: back and said, why didn't we know about that? This
Speaker 3: was nineteen fifty one. It was the biggest dome in
Speaker 3: the world. It was demolih for political reasons. Interestingly, so
Speaker 3: they were in awe and the images, I mean no extraordinary.
Speaker 3: So nineteen fifty one was it more or less hard
Speaker 3: on the heels of World War II, and Brittain was
Speaker 3: in true austerity mode. You still had rationing, so you
Speaker 3: had a little book and when you went to buy
Speaker 3: food or clothes then you could only buy depending on
Speaker 3: the number of coupons like postage stamps that you'd got left.
Speaker 3: But that period was the first nuclear power station, was
Speaker 3: the first commercial jet. It was the de Havelan Comet
Speaker 3: was in terms of cars created the R type Bentley
Speaker 3: one hundred and twenty miles an hour hour on hour.
Speaker 3: It costs twice two houses at that time, the semi detached,
Speaker 3: So this was an extraordinary era. Now since then for
Speaker 3: a whole variety of reasons, many of them political. It's
Speaker 3: no longer the leading at that level of innovation, manufacturing
Speaker 3: and so on, and that factors are quite complex. Some
Speaker 3: of them are political and others social. So you do
Speaker 3: have this sicklical and you can look at the rise
Speaker 3: and for the Empires and the relationship between the way
Speaker 3: in which that might be celebrated, either through the technology
Speaker 3: or the architecture of the time, and the architecture of
Speaker 3: the Festal of Britain at that time was absolutely extraordinary.
Speaker 3: And that was the achievement of one administration. But literally
Speaker 3: when the next administration came down, for whatever reason, I
Speaker 3: would surmise that it was seen as a threat. So
Speaker 3: it was amout. The only element which is still standing
Speaker 3: on the South on the South Bank, and you know
Speaker 3: there is the Festival Hall, of course, but that was
Speaker 3: part of that of that creation.
Speaker 2: I had no idea. Yeah, that's fascinating. Since you brought
Speaker 2: up rationing, how do budgets work for buildings? If I'm
Speaker 2: a client of Foster and Partners, one can dream and
Speaker 2: I come to you and I say I want to
Speaker 2: build a building. Do I present you with a particular
Speaker 2: figure or a range, or do you study my needs
Speaker 2: and then you come back with a suggested buddy.
Speaker 3: There's no absolute way around this. I mean, it may
Speaker 3: be that the budget is absolutely fake. We have that
Speaker 3: amount of money, how can we optimize how can we
Speaker 3: maximize the value. Well, first of all, there is not
Speaker 3: the relationship that you would expect between quality and how
Speaker 3: much you spend on a building.
Speaker 1: Hmm.
Speaker 3: There are so many buildings I could point to where
Speaker 3: a fortune's been spent and you just wouldn't near You
Speaker 3: wouldn't want to go near that building. There are buildings
Speaker 3: where they're noble buildings and they were built on very
Speaker 3: very tight budget. So quality is an attitude of mine.
Speaker 3: It's not how much you spend, it's how wisely you
Speaker 3: spend it. So that is philosophical, but it's tangible in
Speaker 3: terms of the end results. So you may have somebody
Speaker 3: who says that's it. This is my this is my resource.
Speaker 3: And there are three resources and one is the most valuable.
Speaker 3: So you have money, you have time, because time is
Speaker 3: also money. The longer you spend on your project, most
Speaker 3: likely the lower you've actually going to get. Because so
Speaker 3: that in many ways, when you can do something faster
Speaker 3: within reasonable limits, then you're maximizing. Often if you have
Speaker 3: a fixed amount of time and you draw that out
Speaker 3: and draw it out, the money is losing over that bit.
Speaker 3: But the third resource is creative energy, and that is
Speaker 3: far and away the most valuable because that's going to
Speaker 3: determine what you get for your money. So we know
Speaker 3: what happens with whoever comes along and their pot is fixed.
Speaker 3: What if they don't know, then I think you have
Speaker 3: the importance of simulating or modeling and saying if you
Speaker 3: go in this direction, then it's going to cost you that.
Speaker 3: If you go in this direction is going to cost
Speaker 3: you that. And in many ways, if again, if I
Speaker 3: try and find a simple analogy, if you take a car,
Speaker 3: the base cost of that car in many cases is
Speaker 3: relatively low. The cost of driving it out of the showroom,
Speaker 3: depending on the extras that you have either agreed or
Speaker 3: brought into, is going to change the cost of driving
Speaker 3: that car out of the showroom. And in many cases
Speaker 3: that is obviously true of a building. So it's a
Speaker 3: part of the creative process to actually define that budget.
Speaker 3: But notwithstanding illusions, the reality is that cost is always
Speaker 3: a factor. But the important thing is also, and it's overlooked,
Speaker 3: it's not just the cost of how much it costs
Speaker 3: to buy that building, how much does it cost to
Speaker 3: run and then over the lifetime of that project, the
Speaker 3: decision to spend that amount of money on that kind
Speaker 3: of building or another kind of building. So, for example,
Speaker 3: how do you put a price on the ability of
Speaker 3: the Hong Kong Bank to be able to introduce that
Speaker 3: dealer's flow, or for Willie's Faber not to have to
Speaker 3: build another building because they can incorporate the new digital technology.
Speaker 3: How do you put a price on that? And how
Speaker 3: do you put a price on a building which significantly
Speaker 3: improves productivity because in the longer scheme of things, the
Speaker 3: first cost of a building is a relatively small proportion
Speaker 3: of the bigger financial pature.
Speaker 4: You mentioned creative energy, and of course one of your
Speaker 4: famous relatively recent buildings that, of course, the big circular
Speaker 4: building for Apple. And that's a strange situation, I imagine, because
Speaker 4: here is a company that is also known for an
Speaker 4: insane amount of creative creative energy in more or less
Speaker 4: the same realm as yourself of visual design, right, et cetera.
Speaker 4: Was that a unique experience or distinct experience to work
Speaker 4: on a building for a company whose main thing is
Speaker 4: also in large part visual aesthetics.
Speaker 3: No, I don't think it was, because I don't think
Speaker 3: that ever came into it. So Steve had the ability
Speaker 3: to be able to be on his hands and knees
Speaker 3: worrying about the detail of a plug in a socket
Speaker 3: and at the same time be sensitive to the big picture.
Speaker 3: And I think that that there are relatively few people
Speaker 3: that you come in contact who have that appreciation of
Speaker 3: the importance of scale. Mike Bloomberg, by the way, and
Speaker 3: I'm not just saying that is another individual who has
Speaker 3: in any conversation will challenge a tiny detail or like
Speaker 3: the idea of having a wooden floor, and then all
Speaker 3: kinds of things follow from that. But obviously is a
Speaker 3: big picture person which which we know and we take
Speaker 3: for granted less. And so perhaps Mike's ability to challenge
Speaker 3: a lifting consultant about the elevators and so on, so
Speaker 3: and I have to say that's fantastic. I mean, the
Speaker 3: most most interesting individuals to work with those who challenge,
Speaker 3: there's no question. And the more that you do have
Speaker 3: that ability to challenge each other in the process, then
Speaker 3: arguably the better the end end result.
Speaker 2: You know, you mentioned productivity earlier, and this is slightly
Speaker 2: tangential to architecture, but I would be very curious to
Speaker 2: get your thoughts. We've seen productivity gains in virtually every
Speaker 2: industry on Earth in recent decades, except famously the construction industry.
Speaker 2: In the US, construction has lagged behind in terms of productivity.
Speaker 2: I'm pretty sure it's a similar story in the UK
Speaker 2: and perhaps some other countries around the world. Do you
Speaker 2: have a theory for why that is? Why hasn't construction
Speaker 2: I guess developed as much as a lot of other
Speaker 2: industries technologically.
Speaker 3: I think that some societies, and it's interesting we were
Speaker 3: talking earlier about Asia China. There is a book called
Speaker 3: Breakneck by.
Speaker 2: He's been on this podcast many times.
Speaker 3: And as you know, the thesis behind that book is
Speaker 3: that China is hierarchically, is run by engineers and they're
Speaker 3: about doing things, and America is run by lawyers and
Speaker 3: they don't have necessarily the same priorities. And I think
Speaker 3: that that's perhaps an extreme example of the fact that
Speaker 3: some societies the status is associated with the ability to
Speaker 3: make of craft. Switzerland has that, so in Switzerland the
Speaker 3: cabinet maker. Those who make have that standing in society.
Speaker 3: If I go to the United Kingdom on a building side,
Speaker 3: it's probably likely to be polic speaking. Why polic speaking,
Speaker 3: because those craft skills are still alive and well in Poland,
Speaker 3: and they've been exported. And we talked earlier about that
Speaker 3: time in nineteen fifty one when I was sixteen and
Speaker 3: was I sixteen in nine Yes, now, in that in
Speaker 3: the period between now and then, you had and this
Speaker 3: is not a criticism of one particular party or one individual,
Speaker 3: but Margaret Thatcher, who did a whole number of positive things.
Speaker 3: One of the negative things was to dismember the industrial
Speaker 3: base of the United Kingdom, and not surprisingly, perhaps then
Speaker 3: the status of those who make accordingly suffered. So I
Speaker 3: think that the rather complex answer to your question is
Speaker 3: that some societies encourage and and noble. And I mean
Speaker 3: it's interesting. I mean, my daughter is just graduating from
Speaker 3: Yale in architecture and one of the great things about
Speaker 3: the Yeir School of Architecture is, unlike I think any
Speaker 3: school that I know, in the first year, they make
Speaker 3: a building, They design a building, and then they make.
Speaker 2: It, they actually build it.
Speaker 3: They actually build it I mean, obviously they have supervision
Speaker 3: from skilled builders, and then it it's handed over and
Speaker 3: a family lives in it and they see the success
Speaker 3: or otherwise of their endeavors, which is absolutely fantastic and
Speaker 3: one of the reasons why. And here I you know
Speaker 3: that I'm a graduate of Yale, so I'm a Yale alumni,
Speaker 3: so I have a certain But the point that I
Speaker 3: was going to make was that my daughter called me
Speaker 3: and said, I just started work on the building. I'm
Speaker 3: on a building site, and she said, you know what,
Speaker 3: for the first time, I really appreciate manual workers. I
Speaker 3: know what it is, and it's that you know, the
Speaker 3: the making of something. I mean, when you go on
Speaker 3: a building site you think, is this ever going to
Speaker 3: turn into something that can be habitable? Is muddy boots.
Speaker 3: And part of the practice we were talking about, or
Speaker 3: indeed anything, whether it's here in the foundation doing a project,
Speaker 3: whether it's in the practice, it's we push. You get
Speaker 3: on the building site, you get the hard hat on,
Speaker 3: you get into the factories, you engage with those. This
Speaker 3: is not fashionable. This is not necessarily taught. Yeo School
Speaker 3: of Architecture an exception, and there is a nobility in
Speaker 3: making it, and there should be in the same way
Speaker 3: you know that those who protect us, those who keep
Speaker 3: us healthy, that they should have a much higher standing
Speaker 3: in society.
Speaker 4: This sort of leads to my next question, and it
Speaker 4: kind of relates to, I guess the sort of cliche
Speaker 4: what should young architects or aspiring architects think go about?
Speaker 4: But one dimension that I'm particularly interested in is, Okay,
Speaker 4: you talk about how in the ideal scenario, the engineers,
Speaker 4: the construction firm, the architects, they're all there from the beginning.
Speaker 4: That's not handoff, and that sounds really good, great, and
Speaker 4: it seems to.
Speaker 3: Old, but you're breaking down silos too.
Speaker 4: On the other hand, that model also means that when
Speaker 4: you know the client comes with the budget, the architect
Speaker 4: just gets one slice of it right And so perhaps
Speaker 4: you know, architects in the US it's sort of famous
Speaker 4: for as professionals on like say doctors, lawyers, et cetera.
Speaker 4: They're not paid as well as others. And maybe it's
Speaker 4: because you know they're sharing, they're sharing the pie with
Speaker 4: many other entities. What should aspiring architects think about to
Speaker 4: just have like a satisfied career, but also a remunerat
Speaker 4: or remunerative career that can sustain themselves.
Speaker 3: No, you're absolutely right. I think that it's it's rooted
Speaker 3: in the birth of the profession, which was always an
Speaker 3: aristocratic element. It was always a kind of gentleman's pursuit,
Speaker 3: and that may have been appropriate at a point where
Speaker 3: architecture it was a very very tiny slice of the
Speaker 3: buildings that society needed. So it was your cathedrals, it
Speaker 3: was your maybe your town halls, but the whole I mean,
Speaker 3: the hospital was most likely a converted other kind of building.
Speaker 3: Airports didn't exist, railway stations didn't exist. So the whole
Speaker 3: building spectrum has grown, but in many ways the importance
Speaker 3: of the architecture as an integral part of that and
Speaker 3: a decisive part, because design determines so much of the outcome,
Speaker 3: the cost of a building, the performance of a building,
Speaker 3: how much it meets the needs of the public at large,
Speaker 3: or the everything we've been talking about that is underappreciated,
Speaker 3: it's undervalued, and it's underpaid. And those of us who
Speaker 3: are able, we try to do what we can to
Speaker 3: change that. That you're needing, really to bring in the
Speaker 3: profession at an earlier stage of decision making.
Speaker 2: I'm sure this question will not be unexpected for you,
Speaker 2: but what happens to architects in the age of AI,
Speaker 2: Because you could mount a very clear argument that if
Speaker 2: we have new technology that's able to do pretty much everything,
Speaker 2: including potentially modeling and designing buildings to very specific specs
Speaker 2: and needs, that that will mean that architects are perhaps
Speaker 2: even less well remunerated than they are now.
Speaker 3: I could argue an opposite point that if you could
Speaker 3: do more with les if you had the enhancement of
Speaker 3: such a tool. But if I go back to square one,
Speaker 3: AI is not something that happened yesterday. It's been evolving
Speaker 3: gradually over time, gaining momentum, gaining awareness in the same
Speaker 3: way that the whole issue of sustainability. Sustainability was at
Speaker 3: the core of the practice when it emerged in the
Speaker 3: nineteen sixties. You could argue the rest of the world
Speaker 3: has finally caught up with that. But many of the
Speaker 3: things that we were doing back then were fringe activity.
Speaker 3: Now their mainstream. They're in everybody's from page headline. And
Speaker 3: if artificial intelligence is the accumulation of everything that has
Speaker 3: gone before, then some of the most interesting things that
Speaker 3: we've done architecturally have not gone before. So the points
Speaker 3: that I was making about creating a tower without a
Speaker 3: central core and taking that central core, artificial intelligence is
Speaker 3: not going to tell you about that is going to
Speaker 3: tell you everything that it knows about central court buildings.
Speaker 3: So artificial intelligence is accumulated history. What is history, It's
Speaker 3: the past. So that is going to make it even
Speaker 3: more important for those who use all the advantages of
Speaker 3: artificial intelligence but are not inhibitedly dependent on it. Maybe
Speaker 3: it's a bit like going into the home of Steve
Speaker 3: Jobs and finding a rare book on a pedestal. The
Speaker 3: rare book becomes even more in the digital age.
Speaker 4: I have one last question. I don't I have no
Speaker 4: idea if you like the term or find the term
Speaker 4: starkitect annoying or not. But you know, when you see
Speaker 4: a list of them, you're one of them. But there
Speaker 4: is a generation of them who the people who are
Speaker 4: called starkitects, And there doesn't seem to be a lot
Speaker 4: of new names. And I'm curious, if you perceive the
Speaker 4: next century, could there be another person to the extent
Speaker 4: that anyone ever knows the names of architects. It's always
Speaker 4: going to be somewhat narrow, But will there be architects
Speaker 4: who emerge in the next century that everyone knows the
Speaker 4: name of, or has something changed such that that individual
Speaker 4: won't be a pop culture figure.
Speaker 3: In the same way, I'm often invoking buildings from the
Speaker 3: past for their importance, not just in terms of nostalgia,
Speaker 3: but for the lessons that we can learn from them.
Speaker 3: So if I take the solar powered community of an
Speaker 3: educational institute like Masdar, which is totally solar powered in
Speaker 3: the desert, that was only made possible by applying the
Speaker 3: lessons from an architecture of the past which didn't have
Speaker 3: access to instant electrical energy to power air conditioning. So
Speaker 3: it was about scaling streets for people and not cars,
Speaker 3: creating shadow orientation. It was about evaporative cooling, which meant
Speaker 3: bringing in vegetation. It was about colonnades for shade. It
Speaker 3: was about layering a building. It was about capturing the
Speaker 3: cool air at a height above and funneling it through
Speaker 3: wind towers and so on. Applying all of those lessons
Speaker 3: and then the technology of our age so able to
Speaker 3: demonstrate that you can have the living qualities that we
Speaker 3: take for granted. But solar powered in a very very
Speaker 3: hostile environment. So that is learning from an architecture without architects.
Speaker 3: Obviously those architects were there, they didn't have a name.
Speaker 3: It was more anonymous. If you fast forward, yes, names
Speaker 3: are known. I think your star architect really inevitably, some
Speaker 3: architects do the kinds of buildings that attract attention. But
Speaker 3: also if I take and you know you're looking at
Speaker 3: me when you're using that word, but but I would,
Speaker 3: I would like to take you to a little building
Speaker 3: in Manchester called Maggie's, which is a cancer research station.
Speaker 3: I like to take you to a small chapel which
Speaker 3: is the tiniest building that we've done on an island
Speaker 3: in Venice. And each in these different ways, particularly the
Speaker 3: Maggie or some of the hospital health work that we've done,
Speaker 3: is in its impact really really significant. But it's not
Speaker 3: necessarily newsworthy because it doesn't happen to be pace the
Speaker 3: model behind us, the biggest of its kind at that time,
Speaker 3: or the highest of its kind, or if it's MEO
Speaker 3: fired up. So in many ways, what is newsworthy is
Speaker 3: necessarily what is the most important of its time.
Speaker 4: We'll definitely take you up on that tour.
Speaker 3: If that's a real offering, absolutely.
Speaker 2: All right, Norman Foster, thank you so much for coming
Speaker 2: on odd Lots really enjoyed it.
Speaker 3: Thank you, Joe.
Speaker 2: That was a fascinating discussion. I feel like I have
Speaker 2: a new appreciation of arche texture, not that I didn't
Speaker 2: appreciate buildings before. Sure, maybe I should say I feel
Speaker 2: inspired to start knocking down walls in my own my
Speaker 2: own house.
Speaker 4: Go for it, Tracy, I think you should. You know,
Speaker 4: I have to say I did not expect that conversation
Speaker 4: to really veer so much into like political economy basically
Speaker 4: and some of the you know, to discuss the econom
Speaker 4: or why basically countries like the UK and the US
Speaker 4: decided to stop attempting to build great things, and the
Speaker 4: connection between the era of building great things and consumer rationing,
Speaker 4: and of course, you know, China building a lot of
Speaker 4: great things, also famous for financial oppression of various sorts.
Speaker 4: So I was not expecting to hear like that crisp
Speaker 4: economic idea that we talk about a lot articulated in
Speaker 4: this particular conversation.
Speaker 2: By Norman Foster. Yeah.
Speaker 4: No, I also not expecting didn't read the den lingo.
Speaker 2: That's right, Yeah, what a reference. We'll have to tell
Speaker 2: Dan about that.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Well, the other thing I was thinking, going back to
Speaker 2: the interview we did with Allentown Mayor Matt Turk, was
Speaker 2: this idea of small scale manufacturing. And I don't think
Speaker 2: he used this specific term dignity at work, but this
Speaker 2: idea of you know, making things and then making the
Speaker 2: job of making things desirable, allowing people to like be
Speaker 2: close to where they're working and things like that. And
Speaker 2: you could see some parallels with the construction industry today, right,
Speaker 2: Like you want people to feel proud making things, and
Speaker 2: you want the process of making things to actually be
Speaker 2: an enjoyable one.
Speaker 4: Everybody wants those glistening like Shenzen skylands, but nobody.
Speaker 2: No one wants to build them.
Speaker 4: No one wants to allocate those societal resources to be
Speaker 4: part of the you know, the construction crew that does that.
Speaker 4: That seems like the one of the big challenges of
Speaker 4: our time.
Speaker 2: Yeah, shall we leave it there.
Speaker 4: Let's leave it there.
Speaker 2: This has been another episode of the Audults podcast. I'm
Speaker 2: Tracy Alaway. You can follow me at Talloway and I'm
Speaker 2: Jill Wisenthal.
Speaker 4: You can follow me at The Stalwart. Follow our producers
Speaker 4: Carmen Rodriguez at Carmen armand dash Ol Bennett at Dashbot,
Speaker 4: Killbrooks at Kilbrooks and Kevin Lozano at Kevin Lloyd Lozano.
Speaker 4: And for more odd Loots content, go to Bloomberg dot
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