Architecture · Contemporary
born 1935 · British
High-tech architecture
Britain's most prolific modern architect and, with Richard Rogers, the founder of high-tech architecture: buildings whose structure, lifts and ducts are expressed rather than hidden, detailed with the precision of aircraft engineering. Foster's practice has produced the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank, the Reichstag dome, the Gherkin, the Millau Viaduct and Apple's headquarters. He won the Pritzker Prize in 1999 and remains at the head of Foster + Partners.
A 41-storey City of London tower of 2004 with a curved diagrid skin, spiralling dark light-wells and a dome-topped restaurant, universally named after a pickle (2004)
30 St Mary Axe, City of London
30 St Mary Axe, the Gherkin — winner of the 2004 Stirling Prize
A 1985 bank headquarters hung from eight masts, with ladder trusses, a sunscoop mirror and an atrium entered from underneath through a glass belly (1985)
Central, Hong Kong
The Hongkong and Shanghai Bank headquarters — for a time the most expensive building ever built
A 2004 cable-stayed motorway bridge over a French river valley, its tallest mast reaching 343 m — higher than the Eiffel Tower (2004)
Millau, Aveyron, France
The Millau Viaduct, engineered with Michel Virlogeux — the tallest bridge in the world
A glass and mirror cupola of 1999 with a double spiral ramp, put on top of a burnt-out nineteenth-century parliament so voters can walk above their politicians (1999)
Berlin, Germany
The new dome of the Reichstag, won in competition in 1992
A two-acre museum courtyard roofed in 2000 by a glazed steel lattice of 3,312 unique triangles, wrapped round a round reading room (2000)
British Museum, London
The Great Court of the British Museum — the largest covered square in Europe
A 2000 steel suspension footbridge from St Paul's to Bankside that famously swayed and shut for nearly two years (2000)
River Thames, London
With Arup and the sculptor Anthony Caro; the 'wobbly bridge' reopened in 2002 with dampers
A 1978 glazed shed at an East Anglian university housing a private collection of tribal and modern art, with services in a zone round the walls (1978)
University of East Anglia, Norwich
The Sainsbury Centre, for Robert and Lisa Sainsbury
A ring-shaped Californian corporate campus of 2017, four storeys high and a mile round, glazed in the largest curved panels ever made (2017)
Cupertino, California
Apple Park, developed with Steve Jobs; often called 'the spaceship'