Jumps in scale have been a characteristic of the history of Norman Foster and the various iterations of the practice he founded. He came to global attention as a young architect by winning the competition to design the Hongkong & Shanghai Bank headquarters in Hong Kong, a major tower on that (then) country’s skyline. His previous tallest building had been the brilliant but tiny four-storey fluid workspace for Willis Faber in unfashionable Ipswich.

The modesty of much of the earlier work, including designs carried out with Team 4, showed no lack of aspiration in respect of ideas, it was simply that the projects were not on a large scale. With the HSBC project all that changed, and it would be easy enough to write a history of the practice from the point of view of size, with everything getting bigger all the time, built and unbuilt. The Tokyo Tower, for example, was a latter-day version of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Mile-High...[+]