On 1 June Madrid’s Royal Theater was the venue of ‘Future is Now,’ a forum that brought together leading personalities from the economic, technological, and artistic fields, from the former mayor of New York City and owner of the world’s largest financial information company, Michael Bloomberg, to the Chief Design Officer of Apple, Jonathan Ive, passing through the chairman of MIT Media Lab, Nicholas Negroponte, architects like Alejandro Aravena, artists like Olafur Eliasson and Cornelia Parker, and journalists like Christiane Amanpour.

Norman Foster, Elena Ochoa, Luis Fernández-Galiano, and Ricky Burdett are the trustees of a foundation whose mission is to look after the architect’s archives (consisting of over 74,000 documents) while promoting research and development projects of an innovative nature, such as the Droneport, a prototype station for drones serving the needs of the African continent. All these activities will be organized from the palace that Joaquín Saldaña built for the Duke of Plasencia on Calle Monte Esquinza in Madrid, which has been expanded with an exquisite glass pavilion designed by Foster and a lightweight canopy by the sculptor Cristina Iglesias. Here, from now on, visitors will be able to admire not only the architect’s drawings and models, but also some of the finest pieces of his personal art and design collection, such as the mythical Forme uniche della contuiuità nello spazio by Umberto Boccioni and L’Oiseau dans l’espace by Constantin Brancusi, not to mention the no less mythical Voisin car owned by Le Corbusier.