Optimism in difficult times
Of Norman Foster his biographers say that he was born on the wrong side of the railroad tracks that separate the center of Manchester from the humid and cold suburbs of the city.
It runs the year 1935. His parents, Robert Foster and Lilian Smith, rent a modest home in Crescent Grove, in Levenshulme, for 14 shillings a week. They settle there with their baby, and that boy seems destined to the humble life of his social class. There's no phone in the Foster's house. Nor books. Television does not exist yet.
Their parents are hard-working and their modest jobs do not leave them much time to attend to their only child, who is often left in the care of relatives and neighbors. He attends school in Burnage, but there he feels somewhat displaced. When he is 16 years old, his father convinces him to take the entrance exam to work as an apprentice in the Tax Department of the City Council. He passes the exam and his parents are delighted, but to Norman that job disappoints him.
After doing military service in the Royal Air Force, a choice inspired by his passion for airplanes, on his return he does not want to return to his job at City Hall as his parents wish. He starts working as an assistant in a small architecture studio, John Bearshaw and Partners. In his spare time, Norman is making a portfolio with his own designs. He teaches one day to Bearshaw and he is impressed by his talent as a draftsman, to the point that he is assigned a position among the designers of his team. Time later, Bearshaw tries to convince Foster to stay there and learn little by little his trade as a designer, but the young man declines the offer because he has proposed to study architecture at university.
In 1956, Foster obtained a place at the School of Architecture and Urbanism of the University of Manchester. He does not get a scholarship, so, to pay for his studies, he has to sell ice creams, be a night watchman in a nightclub and work at night in a local bakery making buns. He combines all this with long visits to the public library in Levenshulme, where he continues with great interest in the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier and Oscar Niemeyer.
He graduated in 1961. His extraordinary record allows him to enjoy the Henry Fellowship scholarship and do a graduate degree at Yale University. The American stage is decisive. America seems to be a place where success depends only on talent and effort. In 1962, back in England, he started his own studio. Half a century later, Foster + Partners is a large corporation, an architecture firm that has left its mark on five continents, and where 1,400 people work, including more than 600 architects from 50 countries.
Foster's biography is that of a self-made man, who becomes an indisputable figure in world architecture, for his effort, with a certain dose of luck, it is true, but also of drama.
Foster assures that it is necessary to always be restless and optimistic: "I do not believe that optimism should be reserved only for good times." In difficult times we also need to have an open mind, commitment to hard work, professionalism ... To all that I mean when I speak of optimism, New York's most emblematic buildings, such as the Empire State Building or the Rockefeller Center or the Chrysler Building, were conceived at a time of deep economic depression in the country, they dreamed of great things and struggled to make reality their dreams."
His biography is very interesting. It is an example of how to overcome what seems destiny and is not. An example of how to aspire to high goals, to maintain the north, to lean on those meridian ideas that to some seem a chimera but are those that inspire the lives of the people. An example of perseverance and nonconformity, of optimism in bad times, of not giving up. A good reference for those who want to aspire to more and not give up before their time.
