His Practice

Foster’s earliest works explored the idea of a technologically advanced “shed,” meaning a structure surrounded by a lightweight shell or envelope. Foster’s first buildings to receive international acclaim were the Sainsbury Centre for the Visual Arts (1978) in Norwich, England, a vast airy glass and metal paneled shed, and the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation headquarters (1986) in Hong Kong, a futuristic steel-and-glass office building with a stepped profile.

In these commissions, he established himself as one of the world’s leaders in high- tech design: for the latter building, for example, he had ingeniously moved elements such as elevators to the exterior of the building, where they could be easily serviced, and thus created open plans in the center of the spaces. Balancing out this high-tech character, many of Foster’s buildings utilized green spaces, or mini-atria, that were designed to allow maximum amount of natural light into the offices.

In this way, Foster created a more fluid relationship between inside and outside spaces and strove to impart a sense of humanity into an otherwise futuristic environment.