Norman Foster

My guest for this episode is John Small, ex-partner at Foster and Partners (where he founded and led their Product Design Group); ex Director of Design at Steelcase; and ex tutor at the Royal College of Art, where he originally gained his Masters in furniture design and manufacturing. John is currently teaching interior design at Norwich University. Our conversation started and ended on the topic of trying to clear creative block or as he describes it, unlocking the door to creativity. We covered the subtle differences between crafting and creating, whether it’s possible to intentionally design an icon, the importance of collaboration, and how Norman Foster sees things that others don’t, inspiring many “why didn’t I think of that?” moments. John was speaking to me from his newly built, self-designed garden studio. He mentions his work on the LINC, Steelcase’s Learning and Innovation Centre in Munich. Both buildings are very inspiring on very different scales, and shifting between project sizes like this is another topic we covered.

This week we’re talking to Britain’s most revered architect, Lord Foster , and to the design guru and co-founder of the Design Museum , Stephen Bayley , about their quest to put beauty back at the heart of contemporary building. The registered charity, the Royal Fine Art Commission Trust , which Stephen chairs, staged its first ever Building Beauty Awards on Monday 21st November at the Stirling Prize winning Bloomberg building in the City – which Norman Foster designed. We discuss the winners across four categories: building, engineering, public spaces and little gems, the last designed to cheer residents and bring pride to a built neighbourhood. This is a rare chance to hear two such prominent figures from the world of architecture and design discuss what constitutes beauty in new building today. Building beauty reaps rich award – the winners received £10,000, the joint biggest prize in architecture and a Portland stone rhodium-plated trophy created by the jeweller Theo Fennell – who was also one of the judges. Tune in to find out who the winners of the prize were and to hear about the first Royal Fine Art Commission Trust International Building Beauty Prize at World Architecture Festival in Lisbon next week.

In this episode of the Common Futures Series, Vishaan Chakrabarti talks about how last century impacted on cities, in a way that they were created for cars not for people. This century's challenge is to give the cities back to the people, by creating new solutions using new technologies that can make cities more sustainable. Vishaan Chakrabarti is the founder and creative director of Practice for Architecture and Urbanism (PAU). He is the author of A Country of Cities: A Manifesto for an Urban America, published in 2013. Chakrabarti is currently on leave from his tenured faculty position at the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley), where he served as the William W. Wurster Dean of the College of Environmental Design. After the tragic events of 9/11, he was appointed to be the planning director for Manhattan. In this position he collaborated on the nowrealised efforts to save the High Line and revitalise the World Trade Center site. He serves on the boards of the Architectural League of New York, the Regional Planning Association, the Norman Foster Foundation and The World Around You. Common Futures is a new series of podcasts produced by the Norman Foster Foundation that aim to empower our community to make positive change as a platform for people around the world to share and hear inspirational stories and ideas that will shape the future. www.normanfosterfoundation.org

This episode of Common Futures features the winner of the 2021 RIBA Norman Foster Foundation Travelling Scholarship, Weronika Zdziarska, from the Politecnico di Milano, Italy. Zdziarska explains that this project will evaluate previous interventions carried out by international, regional and local organisations in South America, to improve the safety of women in cities. Five cities have been selected for evaluation, each representing different attitudes and responses to this area of research: Medellín, Colombia; Quito, Ecuador; Santiago, Chile; Montevideo, Uruguay and Curitiba, Brazil. The proposal seeks to demonstrate the relationships between gender inequality and design, and to outline best practices for building more inclusive cities. Common Futures is a new series of podcasts produced by the Norman Foster Foundation that aim to empower our community to make positive change as a platform for people around the world to share and hear inspirational stories and ideas that will shape the future. www.normanfosterfoundation.org

Kent Larson is Director of City Science at the MIT Media Lab, with research focused on compact transformable housing, ultralight autonomous mobility systems, sensing and algorithms to recognize and respond to complex human behavior, and advanced modeling, simulation, and tangible interfaces for urban design. Larson’s book, Louis I. Kahn: Unbuilt Masterworks, was selected as one of the Ten Best Books in Architecture 2000 by the New York Times Review of Books. He has founded or cofounded multiple MIT spinoff companies including ORI Living, an architectural robotics company creating systems for dynamically reconfigurable environments. In this podcast, Kent Larson explains the concept of autonomous communities to create the autonomous cities of the future. He also proposes that future architects should be antidisciplinary in order to make the concept of autonomous cities a reality. Common Futures is a new series of podcasts produced by the Norman Foster Foundation that aim to empower our community to make positive change as a platform for people around the world to share and hear inspirational stories and ideas that will shape the future. www.normanfosterfoundation.org

In this podcast – recorded as an exclusive guest chapter for this year’s Outlook 2022 report – Shenal Kakad, our Head of Private Markets, is joined by world-renowned architect Lord Norman Foster to discuss how rethinking urban design can help address some of the world’s most pressing environmental and social challenges.

Tim Stonor is a British architect and urban planner who graduated from The Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, and established the architectural consulting company Space Syntax Limited. Passionate about the ways in which people move, interact and transact in buildings and urban places, Stonor has been recognised internationally for his work in the design of spatial layouts. Alongside his practice, Tim Stonor is a founding member and former director of The Academy of Urbanism, a Visiting Professor at The Bartlett School of Architecture and a Harvard Loeb Fellow. In this podcast, Tim Stonor highlights the importance of urban design in tackling the main challenges that society faces in cities. Tim Stonor imagines the future of cities not only where traffic exists, but also where culture is generated and new ideas are born, with urban design centred on the pedestrian rather than the car. Common Futures is a new series of podcasts produced by the Norman Foster Foundation that aim to empower our community to make positive change as a platform for people around the world to share and hear inspirational stories and ideas that will shape the future. www.normanfosterfoundation.org

Mette Ramsgaard is an award-winning architect and head of the Centre for Information Technology and Architecture (CITA). Ramsgaard's research centres on the intersection between architecture and computer science. Her focus is on the changes that digital technologies cause in the way architecture is thought, designed and built. Mette Ramsgaard has received the 2016 Innovative Academic Program Award of Excellence awarded to CITA by ACADIA and the 2011 Anna Nordlander Prize for female architects, among others. In this podcast, Ramsgaard recognises that architects are now standing in front of a new practice with new digital tools that are allowing to rethink the building process. She also acknowledges the impact that robotics will have in the architecture sector in the near future, including the conceptual changes. Common Futures is a new series of podcasts produced by the Norman Foster Foundation that aim to empower our community to make positive change as a platform for people around the world to share and hear inspirational stories and ideas that will shape the future. www.normanfosterfoundation.org

Farshid Moussavi is an award-winning architect and founder of Farshid Moussavi Architecture (FMA), aiming to go beyond how we have come to think of architecture by questioning the use of buildings. Moussavi is professor in practice of architecture at Harvard University Graduate School of Design and was elected Royal Academician in 2015. She has published three books, The Function of Ornament, The Function of Forms and The Function of Style, based on her research and teaching at Harvard. In this podcast, Farshid Moussavi acknowledges the struggle of understanding and assimilating problems, means and tools arising. She finds potential in the way architecture and the digital have been meeting each other, with architects now relying on digital tools in an indispensable way. Moussavi explains how the use of the digital has led architecture back to its raw state and has liberated buildings from basic ideas of efficiency and storage into places that inspire. She appreciates new problems as opportunities for architecture to make a difference and make the world a better place. Common Futures is a new series of podcasts produced by the Norman Foster Foundation that aim to empower our community to make positive change as a platform for people around the world to share and hear inspirational stories and ideas that will shape the future. www.normanfosterfoundation.org

Farshid Moussavi is an award-winning architect and founder of Farshid Moussavi Architecture (FMA), aiming to go beyond how we have come to think of architecture by questioning the use of buildings. Moussavi is professor in practice of architecture at Harvard University Graduate School of Design and was elected Royal Academician in 2015. She has published three books, The Function of Ornament, The Function of Forms and The Function of Style, based on her research and teaching at Harvard. In this podcast, Farshid Moussavi acknowledges the struggle of understanding and assimilating problems, means and tools arising. She finds potential in the way architecture and the digital have been meeting each other, with architects now relying on digital tools in an indispensable way. Moussavi explains how the use of the digital has led architecture back to its raw state and has liberated buildings from basic ideas of efficiency and storage into places that inspire. She appreciates new problems as opportunities for architecture to make a difference and make the world a better place. #NFFStories is a series of podcasts produced by the Norman Foster Foundation that aims to empower our community to make positive change. A new platform for people around the world to share and hear inspirational stories and ideas that are going to shape the future. www.normanfosterfoundation.org