Luis Fernández-Galiano   Founded in 1985, AV reaches issue 200 a third of a century later. This anniversary coincides with the release of Arquitectura Viva 200, and if to these figures we add two dozen books and more than 80 issues of AV Proyectos, the family of publications

Luis Fernández-Galiano   "Whenever I see the name Foster, I stop reading and I say yes.” Nicholas Negroponte’s reply when I thanked him for his speedy acceptance to write in this volume reflects a widespread feeling. If we have been able to gather here such a group of eminen

J.M. Ledgard   It is night and I am taking a taxi back through the desert from Norman Foster’s carbon-neutral Masdar City. We are lost, idling on a back road on Yas Island, behind Ferrari World, a racetrack and what claims to be the largest indoor amusement park in

Paul Goldberger   One associates Norman Foster with elegance and finesse, which in one sense would seem to make the decision by the proprietors of Château Margaux, one of the most revered wines in the world, to retain Foster + Partners seem altogether natural, a match

Miguel Zugaza   Norman Foster is among international architects one of the most experienced and competent in the creation of spaces for art. The purpose here is not to present the extraordinary, brilliant career of the British architect in terms of this architectura

Jonathan Glancey   If, at low tide, you stand at the bottom of a flight of steps disappearing into the River Thames to the immediate west of Cannon Street station and look to your left, you might just see a lugubrious trickle of water trailing from an unprepossessing s

Joaquín Medina Warmburg   At the time that the firm Foster Associates was starting out, around 1967, the Argentinian designer and critic Tomás Maldonado conceived a sophisticated theory of environmental design that he would put down in La speranza progettuale (published in th

Deborah Berke   A circle is whole, continuous, unbroken, closed. Its shape implies completeness, a kind of unified perfection. Apple Park, Apple’s ring-shaped new headquarters designed by Foster + Partners, invites interpretation; it is a building and a symbol. Loca

Charles Jencks   They say that one in three people get cancer today and that the rate will soon rise to one in two. Not only is this grim statistic a consequence of life in advanced civilisation, but a measure of success in living longer because, if you really live l

Neri Oxman   Since the Industrial Revolution, the world of design has been dominated by the rigors of manufacturing and mass production. Assembly lines have dictated a world made of parts framing the imagination of designers and builders who have been taught to t

Ricky Burdett   Even in the short time of my involvement as a trustee of the Norman Foster Foundation in this ‘futuristic’ project, the future has become a reality. We all know that technology is moving so fast that we can’t keep apace of developments. But in the ca

Deyan Sudjic   SkyCycle is a big idea about design. It is an idea on the scale of the investment that the Victorians made in the 1850s in a modern sewage system for London that put an end to cholera. At the same time the project created the embankments along the Th

Mohsen Mostafavi   It is complicated to write about a city like Masdar. When it comes to visionary projects it is always a question of managing expectations, often in relation to unrealistic aspirations. Masdar is no exception, though the depth of its investigations an

Paul Finch   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 he

Nicholas Negroponte   I’ve often heard people say: ‘I wonder what it would feel like to be on board a spaceship,’ and the answer is very simple. What does it feel like? That’s all we have ever experienced. We are all astronauts on a little spaceship called Earth.” Buckmin

Paul Goldberger   Relatively few architects have solved the challenge of giving physical expression to the desire for a legacy. Of course any architect’s oeuvre is itself a physical expression of his or her legacy, and for most, the built work that they leave behind w

Norman Foster   It has been said that if you wish to see far ahead in time then you must first look back to see lessons from the past. Looking back over my five and a half decades of experience in practice there are a number of lessons that inform the creation and t