Pod Insights Odd Lots Architect Norman Foster on Why the West Struggles to Build Big About this episode Not many people think of designing buildings as an exercise in economics, but the entire process is defined by constraints around resources (both physical and financial), and an iconic building can also have a huge impact on the wealth and development of the area around it. So how do you encourage private developers to consider the public good when designing new projects? And how are some countries able to encourage more landmark building projects than others? In this episode, we speak with Norman Foster, renowned architect and founder of Foster + Partners. We talk to him about how constraints impact his own design process, how building budgets actually work, what makes a building successful in the long run, why China keeps completing mega-project after mega-project, and why places like the UK and the US are now struggling to keep up. Subscribe to the Odd Lots NewsletterJoin the conversation: discord.gg/oddlotsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:51 Tracy Alloway? Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio, news.
2:06 Tracy Alloway? Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Tracy Alockway.
2:10 Joe Weisenthal? And I'm Joe Weisendahl.
2:12 Tracy Alloway? Joe, you know, I spend a lot of my time doing interior design.
2:15 Joe Weisenthal? Yes.
2:16 Tracy Alloway? I've bored you, I'm sure, with a lot of thoughts on this topic, but then it struck me recently that actually what I'm doing is not really interior design. It's actually just interior decorating. Because I'm not really changing the structure of a particular house. I don't like doing that in part because I'm lazy and I hate construction mess, but also because it's a lot harder to change the particular design of a house than it is to just get new fabric for the windows or a new paint color. There are more real world constraints.
2:46 Joe Weisenthal? Yeah, that's an interesting way to put it. I can confirm, having looked over from time to time, you know, we sit next to each other, I can confirm having looked at you, say, like, looking at wallpaper and vintage wallpaper that you might be acquiring, but no, I have not heard of you sort of talking about, you know, knocking down big walls or whatever inside your home, although I certainly, you know, in New York City, you know, people who do that and they hire an architect as part of, they'll buy two condos or something like that and can join them and hire an architect and so forth. That's a different level. It's a different level of constraints and obligations.
3:18 Tracy Alloway? Well, this is the other thing I've been thinking. Am I a product of my time? Because so much of the cultural emphasis nowadays seems to be on interior design and what the inside of a building looks like versus the exterior. And I think if I had been, you know, thinking about these things in like the 90s or the 80s, I would be much more into architecture.
3:38 Joe Weisenthal? It's a really interesting thought, and I hadn't really thought of it that way, but that makes a lot of sense. And my, you know, my uninformed gut is like, oh, does social media make it so that people are just much more obsessed with the interior design of a building, the specific aesthetic choices that are made. But of course, on the other hand, you know, we work at Bloomberg, we have a big office in London.
4:02 Tracy Alloway? Many beautiful buildings.
4:03 Joe Weisenthal? Many beautiful buildings, lots of glass, a new London HQ, absolutely gorgeous building, et cetera. And so, you know, we do live surrounded in this world that the world we live in is one that was built by architects or designed by architects.
4:18 Tracy Alloway? Absolutely. And this was the other thing I was thinking about, architecture in relation to economics is When it's done well, a beautiful building ends up being a public good.
4:28 Joe Weisenthal? Yes.
4:28 Tracy Alloway? It can boost an entire neighborhood. It can revive a particular city. It can improve the flow of traffic, improve energy efficiency, do all these things.
4:37 Joe Weisenthal? Yeah.
4:37 Tracy Alloway? But so many buildings are still designed by private developers. And I'm not sure they're always incentivized to do beautiful design in that way. Like, how do you incentivize a private developer to do something that ends up being a public good?
4:51 Joe Weisenthal? It's a fascinating question. I hadn't really thought of it framed in that way. But like, for example, again, like the new JP Morgan building in New York City. I like it. I don't, I don't work there, but I think it's like a cool addition to Skyline. It blinks, et cetera. There's a lot of cool things. But how do you design? How do you incentivize a public good is a good way to frame it.
5:08 Tracy Alloway? Well, since you mentioned the JP Morgan building, that is a big clue.
5:11 Joe Weisenthal? Purposely dropping breadcrumbs.
5:12 Tracy Alloway? Yes, a huge clue. So we do, in fact, have the perfect guest for today's show. We are going to be speaking to a very famous architect, Lord Norman Foster. He is, of course, the founder of Foster and Partners. And we are here with him in Madrid.
5:26 Joe Weisenthal? In his, in his studio and his foundation.
5:29 Tracy Alloway? Thank you so much for coming on the show.
5:30 Speaker 02 Thank you.
5:31 Tracy Alloway? So how much of architecture is about dealing with real world constraints? Because I always think there's not, there's not just physics and finance, but you're also dealing with things like zoning. And I guess in the UK, you're also dealing with listing requirements and things like that. How much does that constrain you?
5:49 Speaker 02 It's totally rooted in the process of design. So you cannot separate. Design is really a response to constraints. And whether those constraints come from the codes, whether they come from the requirements for the building. Because a building is a response to a need. It then takes on more layers. Yes, it's in the public domain, but it's shaped by constraints, by needs. It's a response. So if you don't have those constraints, if you don't have those demands, if you don't have to meet certain requirements,
6:34 Speaker 02 performance, some of those are tangible. You can measure them. Some are less obvious, more subconscious, perhaps below the surface.
6:46 Joe Weisenthal? Yeah.
6:46 Speaker 02 But nonetheless, so it's a design is a response to needs.
6:51 Joe Weisenthal? We're in this gorgeous building of yours and we were just looking that, you know, over there on the shelf there for a series of wood samples. For example, different types of wood from different trees.
7:01 Tracy Alloway? Cherrywood, plumwood.
7:03 Joe Weisenthal? At the highest levels of architecture to do a great building, how much do you, does the architect really need to know? I guess maybe material science or at least the true nature of specific materials.
7:16 Speaker 02 I think the more that you know about the issues around any assignment, the more you're empowered as a designer. So that has led me over decades to promote a particular way of designing, which is counterintuitive. It's against everything that we're taught in a school of architecture or engineering. And that is you bring all the disciplines together around a table and you work from the outset together. Now, a critic of that will say, that sounds like a committee architecture. It's not. I mean, basically,
8:02 Speaker 02 the team is going to be involved in that project. So if the architect designs and then hands it over to the engineer to make it stand up, to make it hot when it's cold outside and the reverse, you lose the opportunity of the feedback. If you get that at the outset, the designers are more empowered and the designers are really a wider team. But that Needs a process of re-education because engineers have been taught, "Show me what you want, I'll make it work."
8:40 Joe Weisenthal? Yeah.
8:41 Speaker 02 Architects have been taught that they should design in isolation. It goes further. Architects are taught about doing a building in isolation. A city, outside is a street. You could argue the street is the essence of the traditional city. Architects and urbanists are not taught about designing streets. So planners are taught in terms of zoning,
9:07 Joe Weisenthal? Yeah.
9:08 Speaker 02 in terms of the legalities. Architects have talked about individual buildings. So in a way, we have to reassess how we educate. And in our terms, we re-educate, whether it's here in a foundation, preparing civic leaders for the future, enabling them to be able to tell the difference between fashion, prejudice, style, and data and evidence. And the same is true in terms of a building or a city plan.
9:43 Tracy Alloway? Joe brought up the wood samples. I can't help but notice that the majority of items in this room are related to transportation, so cars and jets and trains as well. I also read-
9:56 Speaker 02 The city.
9:57 Tracy Alloway? And the city. But I also read in an older interview, I think someone asked you your favorite building and you replied, "A jumbo jet." Do you have an interest in engineering? Should you have been an engineer instead of an architect?
10:11 Speaker 02 I love flight, I love automobiles. And I think that as designers, we get our inspirations from many different directions. I was deliberately being tongue in cheek in terms of the jumbo jet. But what I really wanted to do was to- Get the audience thinking in a different way about a jumbo. Because when you think about it, it's a restaurant, it's a cinema, it's a hotel. And all the while, it's moving from one place to the other. And also to, to start to, to think about the, the miracle of flight.
10:55 Speaker 02 I mean, there's still an extraordinary magic that these, uh, these machines, which are weighing tons, can somehow by lumbering along the runway, suddenly levitate and then transport us vast distances. And I think there are also a lot of lessons in terms of the built world. In other words, how, how can we use harness technology to improve the quality of life?
11:25 Joe Weisenthal? I'm really fascinated by this idea of, okay, so one might think that an architect is someone who draws lines, draws sketches on a piece of paper. And then maybe there is an engineering firm, and then there's a construction firm, and then so forth. I'm fascinated by this idea, and it rings true with other discussions we have. You know, we talk to traders, for example, and there's obviously a difference between thinking in your head on a good trade versus what it actually takes to execute.
11:54 Speaker 02 Literally this morning, I was sitting around a table with a group of us as architects here in the foundation on a project alongside the individual who will be going to build that building. And we're saying, well, the next stage is to do this, we really have to have the environmental engineer, we have to have this structural engineer, and that will be the next meeting. So that was the first meeting. Now, we were able to go so far, but only so far. And we recognize the need to have those other skills on board. Now, we could have. And it would have been absolutely traditional. We could have just collectively designed that building and then just passed it on.
12:39 Speaker 02 But it would be so many lost opportunities. Because if you think of a building as an integration of systems. I mean, if I tried to bring this back to the world of automotive design and I found myself trying to communicate that, this principle to a group of automotive engineers, not just the engineers, but those who are making the cars. And the example that I took was a point in time in the 1930s, when pretty well, all of the cars, any production car, followed a certain pattern.
13:21 Speaker 02 It was a chassis and then a body on top of that, which was a shell to enclose and protect the occupants from the rain, the elements from nature. And then, at one point, a car emerged. It was the Chrysler Airflow. And the body became not just the shell, it became an integral part of the structure. So the car was lighter and the car was immensely stronger. The promotional video of that time, they pushed the car off the top of the mountain and it kind of rolled and rolled and landed four square.
14:06 Speaker 02 Somebody comes out of the bushes, demonstrates that the, you know, opens the door, gets in and drives away. The point is then that the two separate systems of the shell and the chassis have merged into one element, which is doing both jobs better. So it's doing more with less. Now, imagine that we're talking about the exterior of a building, heating and cooling it. If you think of integrated design, then you're going to end up, if all All those skills are working together. You can really do a system approach to design. You can start to get things doing double duty,
14:50 Speaker 02 performing more, less components, higher performance, more quality and better quality of life. Whether that principle, whether it's in a city or a building, is all of that is to a social end.
15:22 Tracy Alloway? There are some market stories where you want every detail. Joe and I have made quite a few podcasts on that basis. But sometimes you've only got 10 minutes and just want to know what's moving markets fast. That's the Barclays Brief podcast. Every week, experts from Barclays Markets and Research get you up to speed on what's happening and what to watch next. Concise, focused and brief. Search Barclays Brief wherever you get your podcasts.
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16:17 Tracy Alloway? How do you think about the social end of buildings when you're given a particular project? So I know that you often do public buildings and I imagine that you are in dialogue with cities and states around the world when you're doing those. But when you're given a private assignment, such as a JP Morgan building or a Bloomberg office, how do you think about the public good aspect of design?
16:43 Speaker 02 You're thinking simultaneously of how that building works from the inside out. And you're also thinking simultaneously from the outside in. Because arguably, they're two completely separate groups of people. Private inside, public outside, but the building is in the public domain. So if I took the headquarters of Bloomberg, then an early decision was to intersect the building with Watling Street. Watling Street was the old Roman road opposite. If you acknowledged that and you continued that
17:27 Speaker 02 and it became an arcade through the building and you had connectivity over that arcade, then simultaneously you were breaking down the scale of the building. It was then more human. And the public spaces bringing in an artist to create water benches, that was also double duty, the system's approach, providing security. But it wasn't an ugly bollard. You didn't know it was providing security. It was also bringing people together. Then the arcade is an opportunity to introduce shops and so on. That is working with the Bloomberg philosophy
18:10 Speaker 02 of encouraging the neighborhood to benefit from this private entity coming into the community, rather than it being an island and killing off the traders. It's encouraging local traders. Now, everything I've described then is working to the benefit of the interior of the building. And the façades are starting to be able to breathe and pull lots of fresh air into the building. So it's making the building a healthier building. But it's also, on the exterior, not another glass box. It's a combination of bronze and the local stone. Local stone, the stone of the adjoining buildings.
18:56 Speaker 02 So it's working environmentally in terms of sustainability. It's reducing energy, it's creating a healthier building for the occupants. And then because it's deep and low, it's not pushing into the sky. So it is reverential to the historic buildings around it of a same mass. But at the same time, it's creating horizontality. And horizontality is good for communication. And Bloomberg is about communication. Now, I could describe another kind of building for a completely different kind of, of, how can I say, client body,
19:39 Speaker 02 also in the high-tech business. So if I go to Beijing, if I talk about a building there, the company ethos is totally different. It's about competition between groups. So it's the polar opposite, and I could describe that in detail. The point that I'm making is that as I take you through these decisions, the way that they overlap and interact, you start to realize that the process of design is about balancing. It's about reconciling. It's about creating something which is simultaneously working in the public domain,
20:23 Speaker 02 working for a visitor, working for those inside when they come outside.
20:28 Joe Weisenthal? Well, since you alluded to it, and now I'm, now I'm particularly, particularly curious about it. I imagine that in the decades ahead, you know, there will still be new JP Morgan headquarters, new Bloomberg headquarters, et cetera. But there's probably going to be a lot more mega projects still coming out of Asia or Beijing or China specifically. And so when you describe that environment as different, what should the architects of the future know about working in these markets?
20:57 Speaker 02 First of all, I mean, I, I, I took the example of, of the building in China. That same.
21:06 Speaker 02 Need could be anywhere. Okay. It just happened to be in China. So you could have in China exactly the same requirements as a building like JP Morgan or Bloomberg. Although, of course, no two buildings are alike. I mean, each is specific to its own organization, the values of those organizations, the aspirations of those who've created them, whether they're an individual like Mike Bloomberg in Bloomberg, whether it's Steve Jobs with Apple, or whether it's much more corporate, more anonymous. But nonetheless, there are those values.
21:50 Speaker 02 I would say that common to any building anywhere is how do you anticipate the future? So if I go back to an early building which recently celebrated its half-century, and that was the Willis Faber Building in Ipswich, an insurance headquarters. And in the life of that building, that building had a high degree of flexibility. And nobody in their wildest dreams anticipated that that flexibility would be used. But in no time at all after it opened, it opened with typewriters. And in no time, that building,
22:34 Speaker 02 and it was the only building in the insurance industry which was, as a headquarters, able to adapt, it adapted to the digital revolution, to screens. And the same was true of the Hong Kong Bank. The Hong Kong Bank, which I also recently went to their 40th anniversary, as opposed to Willis Faber and their 50th anniversary. So literally a few weeks ago, I was there at that celebration. And the same thing there. That building, quite radical at the time, and still in many ways radical, took the traditional central core of a tower, which contained the structure, the vertical circulation, the bathrooms, mechanical plant, took all that.
23:19 Speaker 02 Fragmented it, put it at the sides of big, open loft things. Nobody anticipated that in the life of that building, the early life, there would be something known as a trading floor, where you need clear line of sight. That wasn't a need in the late 1970s, when the competition for that building. But it was able to absorb that. So I think that the whole thing about the future is that by design, you can, if I say that you create a building for the needs of today with an awareness of the past, but to, as far as you're able to anticipate,
24:04 Speaker 02 a future which is largely unknown. But the, perhaps in terms of infrastructure, having been backwards and forwards to Asia, and if I say China more specifically, over the last 30 years, I mean, the changes that I've seen, which interestingly, I was communicating earlier this week to the Bloomberg event audience here and sharing that experience with them and showing them the China when I first went there. And it's foggy, it's misty, you can't see. The city's now unbelievable.
24:48 Speaker 02 I mean, clean air, 90% of the vehicles, electric, and extraordinary amount of green. I mean, Shanghai is 50%, Beijing 50% green. That's happened over the last few decades. And in terms of connectivity, just over 54,000 kilometers of high-speed train. 220 miles an hour, 350 kilometers an hour. Connecting by this, 97% of Chinese cities.
25:32 Speaker 02 On a pig day, 13 million travelers, achieved in 16 years.
25:40 Speaker 02 And in the UK, they gave up on the London to Manchester. It goes as far as Birmingham. Short-termism. They have a department for leveling up. The ultimate leveling up is connectivity. They just didn't get it. And that 54,000 kilometers is more than the rest of the world put together by a huge margin.
26:06 Tracy Alloway? Why do you think certain countries, and you brought up the UK there, but you could possibly say it the same for the US as well. Why do you think certain countries struggle with big infrastructure?
26:14 Speaker 02 Because at every stage in the emergence, the emergence of a nation, whether that is the United Kingdom in its empire days, the Industrial Revolution, it led the world. We're still trading right now on that. I mean, the Thames Embankment was a response to cholera. It created, if you like systems thinking and doing more with less, it also introduced below-ground, high-speed public transport. It cleaned up the Thames.
26:54 Speaker 02 So that period, you had the expression of that civic pride. I started, I started work at the age of 16 in Manchester Town Hall, which was the ultimate statement of civic pride. And it was a competition. And Waterhouse won that competition. That was my first experience of architecture. Took me a little longer to eventually discover that I could study architecture. So I was a late starter at the age of 21. But I can remember vividly right now, details of that building. I mean, that really lifted my spirit.
27:35 Speaker 02 So whether it was the great train stations, and of course, today, it's the great airports. So if you really want to see the most advanced airports in the world, where do you go? I mean, it's obvious. We know where you go.
27:50 Joe Weisenthal? Right.
27:50 Tracy Alloway? There's a, there's a mock-up right behind you.
27:53 Speaker 02 There's a huge model immediately behind us here.
27:56 Tracy Alloway? We're looking at a Beijing airport.
27:58 Speaker 02 Beijing Airport was built in five years. Now... At the same time, I drew a parallel with Terminal Five, which I think took 20 years and was a fraction of the size and is really a sort of Band-Aid on top of Heathrow, which is still embedded in the heart of, you know, you overfly Metropolis together. So there are a lot of messages, perhaps, mixed up in these analogies and comparisons.
28:28 Joe Weisenthal? No, it makes sense. And I didn't necessarily expect the interview to go in this direction, but I'm actually just gonna press you further on this specific point, which is, what is your diagnosis of why certain countries do seem to have given up? Was there a moment when you felt it? For example, okay, in the UK, was there a moment where you felt the ambition is not the same as it once was?
28:49 Speaker 02 It's interesting. I'm working on a project right now. And so I'm with a team of relatively young architects. And so I'm saying, well, in terms of domes, of course, it would be interesting to make a comparison with a particular dome in the Festival of Britain 1951. And everybody looked at me quizzically. And I said, but you've never heard of it. Nobody had ever heard of it. So I said, well, check it out. And the next meeting, we'll talk about it.
29:32 Speaker 02 The next meeting, they came back and said, why didn't we know about that? This was 1951. It was the biggest dome in the world. It was demolished for political reasons, interestingly. So they were in awe. And the images, I mean, are extraordinary. So 1951 was it more or less hard on the heels of World War II. And Britain was in true austerity mode. You still had rationing. So you had a little book. And when you went to buy food or clothes, then you could only buy, depending on the number of coupons, like postage stamps, that you'd got left.
30:15 Speaker 02 But that period was the first nuclear power station, was the first commercial jet. It was the De Havilland Comet. Was, in terms of cars, created the R-type Bentley, 120 miles an hour, hour on hour. It cost twice, two houses at that time, the semi-detached. So this was an extraordinary era. Now, since then, for a whole variety of reasons, many of them political, it's no longer the leading at that level of innovation, manufacturing, and so on.
30:59 Speaker 02 And, you know, factors are quite complex. Some of them are political and others are social. So you do have this cyclical, and you can look at the rise and fall of empires and the relationship between the way in which that might be celebrated, either through the technology or the architecture of the time. And the architecture of the Festival of Britain at that time was absolutely extraordinary. And that was the achievement of one administration, but literally, when the next administration came down, for whatever reason, I would surmise that it was seen as a threat. So it was demolished.
31:44 Speaker 02 The only element which is still standing on the South Bank, and you know there, is the Festival Hall, of course. But that was part of that. Of that creation.
31:55 Tracy Alloway? I had no idea.
31:56 Joe Weisenthal? Yeah.
31:57 Tracy Alloway? That's fascinating. Since you brought up rationing, how do budgets work for buildings? If I'm a client of Foster and Partners, One Can Dream, and I come to you and I say, I want to build a building, do I present you with a particular figure or a range? Or do you study my needs and then you come back with a suggested budget?
32:17 Speaker 02 There's no, there's no absolute way around this. I mean, it may be that the budget is absolutely fixed. We have that amount of money. How can we optimize? How can we maximize the value? Well, first of all, there is not the relationship that you would expect between quality and how much you spend on a building. There are so many buildings I could point to where a fortune's been spent and you just wouldn't near, you wouldn't want to go near that building.
32:53 Joe Weisenthal? We need the whole list.
32:55 Speaker 02 There are buildings where they're noble buildings and they were built on very, very tight budget. So quality is an attitude of mine. It's not how much you spend, it's how wisely you spend it. So that is philosophical, but it's tangible in terms of the end results. So you may have somebody who says, that's it. This is my, this is my resource. And there are, there are three resources. And one is the most valuable. So you have money, you have time, because time is also money.
33:38 Speaker 02 The longer you spend on your project, most likely, the lower you're actually going to get because, yeah. So that in many ways, when you can do something faster, within reasonable limits, then you're maximizing. Often, if you have a fixed amount of time and you draw that out and draw it out, the money is losing over that. But the third resource is creative energy. And that is far and away the most valuable, because that's going to determine what you get for your money. So.
34:16 Speaker 02 We know what happens with whoever comes along and their pot is fixed. What if they don't know? Then I think you have the importance of simulating or modeling and saying, "If you go in this direction, then it's going to cost you that. If you go in this direction, it's going to cost you that." And in many ways, again, if I try and find a simple analogy. If you take a car, the base cost of that car, in many cases, is relatively low. The cost of driving it out of the showroom, depending on the extras that you have either agreed or bought into,
34:56 Speaker 02 is going to change the cost of driving that car out of the showroom. And in many cases, that is obviously true of a building. So it's a part of the creative process to actually define that budget. But notwithstanding illusions, the reality is that cost is always a factor. But the important thing is also, and it's overlooked, it's not just the cost of how much it costs to buy that building, how much does it cost to run? And then, over the lifetime of that project,
35:41 Speaker 02 the decision to spend that amount of money on that kind of building or another kind of building. So, for example, how do you put a price on the ability of the Hong Kong Bank to be able to introduce that dealer's floor? Or for Willis Faber, not to have to build another building because they can incorporate the new digital technology? How do you put a price on that? And how do you put a price on a building which significantly improves productivity? Because in the longer scheme of things, the first cost of a building is a relatively small proportion of the bigger financial picture.
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37:14 Joe Weisenthal? You mentioned creative energy. And of course, one of your famous relatively recent buildings is of course the big circular building for Apple. And that's a strange situation, I imagine, because here is a company that is also known for an insane amount of creative energy in more or less the same realm as yourself of visual design, right? Is that a unique experience or a distinct experience to work on a building for a company whose main thing is also in large part visual aesthetics?
37:50 Speaker 02 No, I don't think it was because I don't think that ever came into it. So Steve had the ability to be able to be on his hands and knees worrying about the detail of a plug and a socket, and at the same time be sensitive to the big picture. And I think that there are relatively few people that you come in contact who have that appreciation of the importance of scale. Mike Bloomberg, by the way, and I'm not just saying that,
38:33 Speaker 02 is another individual who has, in any conversation, will challenge a tiny detail. Or like the idea of having a wooden floor. And then all kinds of things follow from that. But obviously. Is is, you know, a big picture person which which we know and we take for granted. Less so perhaps Mike's ability to to challenge a lifting consultant about the elevators and so on. So and and I have to say that's fantastic. I mean, the the most interesting individuals to work with are those who challenge.
39:18 Speaker 02 There's no question. And the more that you do have that ability to challenge each other in the process, then arguably the better the end end result.
39:30 Tracy Alloway? You know, you mentioned productivity earlier, and this is slightly tangential to architecture. But I would be very curious to get your thoughts. We've seen productivity gains in virtually every industry on earth in recent decades, except famously the construction industry. In the US, construction has lagged behind in terms of productivity. I'm pretty sure it's a similar story in the UK and perhaps some other countries around the world. Do you have a theory for why that is? Why hasn't construction, I guess, developed as much as a lot of other industries technologically?
40:05 Speaker 02 I think that some societies, and it's interesting. We were talking earlier about Asia, China. There is a book called Breakneck by.
40:22 Tracy Alloway? Dan Wang, he's been on this podcast many times.
40:25 Speaker 02 And as you know, the thesis behind that book is that China hierarchically is run by engineers and they're about doing things. And America is run by lawyers and they don't have necessarily.
40:44 Joe Weisenthal? The same impulse.
40:44 Speaker 02 The same priorities. And I think that that's perhaps an extreme example of the fact that some societies, the.
40:58 Speaker 02 Status is associated with the ability to make of craft. Switzerland has that. So in Switzerland, the cabinet maker, those who make, have that standing in society. If I go to the United Kingdom on a building site, it's probably likely to be Polish-speaking. Why Polish-speaking? Because those craft skills are still alive and well in Poland, and they've been exported.
41:37 Speaker 02 And we talked earlier about that time in 1951, when I was 16.
41:49 Speaker 02 And was I 16 in 1951?
41:54 Speaker 02 Now, in the period between now and then, you had, and this is not a criticism of one particular party or one individual, but Margaret Thatcher, who did a whole number of positive things. One of the negative things was to dismember the industrial base of the United Kingdom. And not surprisingly, perhaps, then the status of those who make accordingly suffered. So I think that the rather complex answer to your question is that some societies encourage and ennoble.
42:40 Speaker 02 And I mean, it's interesting. I mean, my daughter is just graduating from Yale in architecture.
42:52 Speaker 02 And one of the great things about the Yale School of Architecture is, unlike, I think, any school that I know, in the first year, they make a building. They design a building, and then they make it.
43:06 Tracy Alloway? They actually build it.
43:07 Speaker 02 They actually build it. I mean, obviously, they have supervision from skilled builders. And then it's handed over, and a family lives in it. And they see the success, or otherwise, of their endeavors, which is absolutely fantastic. And one of the reasons why, and here, I... You know that I'm a graduate of Yale, so I'm a Yale alumni, so I have a certain... But the point that I was going to make was that my daughter called me and said, "I just started work on the building. I'm on a building site." And she said, "You know what? For the first time, I really appreciate manual workers. I know what it is."
43:52 Speaker 02 And it's that, you know, the making of something. I mean, when you go on a building site, you think, "Is this ever going to turn into something that can be habitable?" It's muddy boots. And part of the practice we were talking about, or indeed, anything, whether it's here in the foundation, doing a project, whether it's in the practice, it's... We push, you get on the building site, you get the hard hat on, you get into the factories, you engage with those who... This is not fashionable, this is not necessarily taught, Yale School of Architecture, an exception.
44:37 Speaker 02 And there is a nobility in making, and there should be, in the same way, you know, that those who protect us, those who keep us healthy, they should have a much higher standing in society.
44:53 Joe Weisenthal? This sort of leads to my next question and it kind of relates to, I guess, the sort of cliche, what should young architects or aspiring architects think about. But one dimension that I'm particularly interested in is, okay, you talk about how in the ideal scenario, the engineers, the construction firm, the architects, they're all there from the beginning. That's not handoff. And that sounds really great and it seems to yield
45:15 Speaker 02 Well, you're breaking down silos also.
45:17 Joe Weisenthal? Totally. On the other hand, that model also means that when, you know, the client comes with the budget, the architect just gets one slice of it, right? And so perhaps, and, you know, architects in the US is sort of famous for as professionals on like, say, doctors, lawyers, et cetera. They're not paid as well as others. And maybe it's because, you know, they're sharing, they're sharing the pie with many other entities. What should aspiring architects think about to not just have like a satisfied career, but also a remunerative career that can sustain themselves?
45:50 Speaker 02 No, you're absolutely right. I think that it's rooted in the birth of the profession, which was always an aristocratic element. It was always a kind of gentleman's pursuit. And that may have been appropriate at a point where architecture was a very, very tiny slice of the buildings that society needed. So was your cathedrals, it was your, maybe
46:27 Speaker 02 your town halls. But, but the whole, I mean, the hospital was most likely a converted other kind of building. Airports didn't exist. Railway stations didn't exist. So the whole building spectrum has grown. But in many ways, the importance of the architect is an integral part of that.
46:58 Speaker 02 And a decisive part because design determines so much of the outcome, the cost of a building, the performance of a building, how much it meets the the needs of the public at large or the everything we've been talking about. That is underappreciated. It's undervalued and it's underpaid. And those of us who are able, we we try to do what we can to to change that. But you're needing really to to bring in the profession at an earlier stage of decision making.
47:42 Tracy Alloway? I'm sure this question will not be unexpected for you. But what happens to architects in the age of AI? Because you could mount a very clear argument that if we have new technology that's able to do pretty much everything, including potentially modeling and designing buildings to very specific specs and needs, that that will mean that architects are perhaps even less well remunerated than they are now.
48:08 Speaker 02 I could argue an opposite point, that if you could do more with less, if you had the enhancement of such a tool. But if I go back to square one, AI is not something that happened yesterday. It's been evolving gradually over time, gaining momentum, gaining awareness in the same way that the whole issue of sustainability. Sustainability was at the core of the practice when it emerged in the 1960s. You could argue the rest of the world has finally caught up with that. But many of the things that we were doing back then
48:54 Speaker 02 were fringe activity. Now they're mainstream. They're in everybody's front page headline. And if artificial intelligence is the accumulation of everything that has gone before, then some of the most interesting things that we've done architecturally have not gone before. So the points that I was making about creating a tower
49:22 Speaker 02 Without a central core and taking that central core, artificial intelligence is not going to tell you about that. It's going to tell you everything that it knows about central core buildings. It's backward looking.
49:35 Joe Weisenthal? You still have to make a decision.
49:36 Speaker 02 So, so, artificial intelligence is accumulated history. What is history? It's the past. So, that is going to make it even more important for those who use all the advantages of artificial intelligence, but are not inhibitedly dependent on it. Maybe it's a bit like going into the home of Steve Jobs and finding a rare book on a, on a, on a pedestal. The rare book becomes even more valuable in the digital age.
50:15 Joe Weisenthal? I have one last question. I don't, I have no idea if you like the term or find the term star architect annoying or not, but you're, you know, when you see a list of them, you're one of them. But there is a generation of them who, the people who are called star architects, and there doesn't seem to be a lot of new names. And I'm curious if you perceive the next century, could there be another person, to the extent that anyone ever knows the names of architects, it's always going to be somewhat narrow, but will there be architects who emerge in the next century that everyone knows the name of? Or has something changed such that that individual won't be a pop culture figure in the same way?
50:55 Speaker 02 I'm often invoking buildings from the past for their importance, not just in terms of nostalgia, but for the lessons that we can learn from them. So if I take the
51:14 Speaker 02 Solar-powered community of an educational institute like Masdar, which is totally solar-powered in the desert, that was only made possible by applying the lessons from an architecture of the past, which didn't have access to instant electrical energy to power air conditioning. So it was about scaling streets for people and not cars, creating shadow orientation. It was about evaporative cooling, which meant bringing in vegetation. It was about colonnades for shade. It was about layering a building. It was about capturing the cool air
51:59 Speaker 02 at a height above and funneling it through wind towers and so on. Applying all of those lessons and then the technology of our age, so able to demonstrate that we can have the living qualities that we take for granted, but solar-powered in a very, very hostile environment. So that is learning from an architecture without architects. Obviously, those architects were there. They didn't have a name. It was more anonymous. If you fast-forward, yes, names are known. I think your star architect, really, inevitably, some architects do
52:43 Speaker 02 the kinds of buildings that attract attention. But also, if I take, and you're looking at me when you're using that word.
52:55 Joe Weisenthal? Sure, I can't help it.
52:56 Speaker 02 But I would like to take you to a little building in Manchester called Maggie's, which is a cancer research station. I'd like to take you to a small chapel, which is the tiniest building that we've done on an island in Venice. And each in these different ways, particularly the Maggie's or some of the hospital health work that we've done, is in its impact. Really, really significant, but it's not necessarily newsworthy because it doesn't happen to be pace the model behind us, the biggest of its kind at that time, or the highest of its kind, or if it's Mio Viaduct. So in many ways, what is newsworthy is not
53:41 Speaker 02 necessarily what is the most important of its time.
53:45 Joe Weisenthal? We'll definitely take you up on that tour if that's a real offer.
53:48 Speaker 02 Absolutely.
53:49 Tracy Alloway? All right, Norman Foster, thank you so much for coming on Odd Lots. Really enjoyed it.
53:55 Speaker 02 Thank you.
54:09 Tracy Alloway? Joe, that was a fascinating discussion. I feel like I have a new appreciation of architecture. Not that I didn't appreciate buildings before.
54:16 Joe Weisenthal? Sure.
54:17 Tracy Alloway? Maybe I should say I feel inspired to start knocking down walls in my own, my own house.
54:21 Joe Weisenthal? Go for it, Tracy. I think you should. You know, I have to say, I did not expect that conversation to really veer so much into like political economy, basically, and some of the, you know, to discuss the economic or why, basically, countries like the UK and the US decided to stop attempting to build great things and the connection between the era of building great things and consumer rationing. And of course, you know, China, building a lot of great things, also famous for financial repression of various sorts. So I was not expecting to hear like that crisp economic idea that we talk about a lot articulated in this particular conversation.
55:01 Tracy Alloway? By Norman Foster?
55:02 Joe Weisenthal? Yeah.
55:03 Tracy Alloway? No, I also think-
55:04 Joe Weisenthal? You're not expecting, read the Dan Langwell.
55:06 Tracy Alloway? That's right. Yeah. What a reference. Um, we'll have to tell Dan about that.
55:11 Joe Weisenthal? Yeah.
55:11 Tracy Alloway? Well, the other thing I was thinking, going back to the interview we did with Allentown Mayor Matt Turk, was this idea of small scale manufacturing and- I don't think he used this specific term dignity at work, but this idea of, you know, making things and then making the job of making things desirable by allowing people to like be close to where they're working and things like that. And you could see some parallels with the construction industry today, right? Like you want people to feel proud of making things and you want the process of making things to actually be an enjoyable one.
55:49 Joe Weisenthal? Everybody wants those glistening like Shenzhen Skylands, but nobody wants to like, yeah, no one wants to allocate the societal resources to be part of the, you know, the construction crew that does that. That seems like the, uh, the one of the big challenges of our time.
56:06 Tracy Alloway? Yeah. Shall we leave it there?
56:08 Joe Weisenthal? Let's leave it there.
56:09 Tracy Alloway? This has been another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway.
56:14 Joe Weisenthal? And I'm Joe Weisenthal. You can follow me at the Stalwart. Follow our producers, Carmen Rodriguez at Carmen Armin, Dashel Bennett at Dashbot, Kail Brooks at Kail Brooks, and Kevin Lozano at Kevin Lloyd Lozano. And for more Odd Lots content, go to Bloomberg.com/oddlots, where we have a daily newsletter and all of our episodes. And you could chat about all these topics 24/7 in our Discord, discord.gg/oddlots.
56:38 Tracy Alloway? And if you enjoy Odd Lots, if you like it when we take the occasional foray into architecture, then please leave us a positive review on your favorite podcast platform. And remember, if you are a Bloomberg subscriber, you can listen to all of our episodes absolutely ad-free. All you need to do is find the Bloomberg channel on Apple Podcasts and follow the instructions there. Thanks for listening.
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