Publication information

FOSTER En el futuro

The new 'Retratos' series – published by Arquitectura Viva in Spanish only – gathers essays by Luis Fernández-Galiano on the life and work of a handful of contemporary architects. In the wake of Moneo el profesor, the first volume out, comes Foster en el futuro, to then be followed, in succession, by tomes on Rem Koolhaas, Renzo Piano, Frank Gehry, Herzog & de Meuron, Peter Eisenman, and Santiago Calatrava. Illustrated with the architects' own drawings and enriched with in-depth interviews, biographical accounts, and analyses of their works, these small books wish to paint pixelated portraits of current masters, informative and critical at the same time.

Foster en el futuro – 96 pages in soft cover – looks at the lifework of Norman Foster, a vast trajectory which the short biography presented by the essays hardly do justice to. After an interview about his formative and training years, the initial article celebrates the construction of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank headquarters, and the rest discuss the Bilbao Metro, the most popular of his works in Spain; his interventions in historic areas for cultural institutions, such as the Carré d'Art media library in Nîmes, the Royal Academy, or the British Museum; the saga of airports, which he transformed with Stansted and took to colossal levels with Chek Lap Kok and the one in Beijing for the Olympic Games; and the work of greatest symbolic magnitude in his entire career, the Reichstag in Berlin: projects which speak the language of technique and prefigure the future while staying tuned to the lessons of the past. This visionary humanist has built his oeuvre staying clear of fashions and maintaining an extraordinary continuity from the early projects to the very latest, as comes to the fore in the conversation that wraps up the book, where his stubborn passion for flight is meshed with the telling of his life story.

Collection 'Retratos', 2021
Language: Spanish
Soft cover
96 pages