Maintaining its longstanding focus on the world’s great architecture, this year Cersaie has invited award-winning british architect Lord Norman Foster, winner of the 1999 Pritzker Prize, to give the much-anticipated keynote lecture. entitled "10 on 10: ten Fosters and ten others", the lecture will be held in the palazzo dei congressi in the Bologna Exhibition Centre at 11.00 a.m. on tuesday 27 September and will be introduced by architecture historian Francesco Dal Co. during the lecture, Foster will discuss 10 projects of his own and 10 carried out by other architects who have influenced him during his extraordinary career.
Lord Foster (in 1999 he was honoured with a life peerage as Lord Foster of thames bank) was born in Manchester in 1935. He graduated from Manchester University School of Aarchitecture and City Planning in 1961, then gained a master’s degree in architecture from Yale University. After setting up the practice team 4 in partnership with Richard Rogers, and his later wife Wendy with whom in 1964 he founded the firm Foster Associates in London. This led to the partnership of Foster + Partners which now has studios in more than 20 countries worldwide. In 1999 Norman Foster won the Pritzker Architecture Prize and in 2000 the Praemium Imperiale Award for Architecture.
Some of his best-known worksinclude the Willis Faber & Dumas headquarters (Ipswich, UK), the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts (Norwich, UK), the Hongkong Bank headquarters (Hong Kong), Hong Kong International Airport and Stansted Airport (UK), the Bilbao metro system (Spain), the Torre de Collserola (Barcelona, Spain), restoration of the Reichstag Building (Berlin, Germany), the Carré d’art (Nîmes, France), the London City Hall (UK) and the Swiss Re headquarters at 30 st. Mary Axe (London, UK).
His latest works include the Millennium Bridge in London, the Millau Viaduct in France, the Hearst Tower in New York, Beijing International Airport, Masdar City in the UAE and Apple Campus 2 in Cupertino, California.
"I can’t describe my style […] because there isn’t a style, because no two projects are the same," Foster said during an interview at the Biennale in 2012. "We don’t have a formula, we have a belief in research, we have a belief in human needs. we have a belief that every project is starting from a clean sheet of paper, even though we build up layers of experience. My inspirations? Impossible to name, too many. I’m inspired by the work of any architect who produces good buildings […]. I’m inspired by the work of engineers, I’m inspired by aircraft, I’m inspired by poetry, by paintings… The list of inspirations is endless and changes all the time. I think that architecture is a response to human needs […]. The power of architecture is that everything that we experience is designed […] and affects the quality of our lives because we live in a world which we create."
Norman Foster recently set up the norman foster foundation to promote research and help younger generation of architects, designers and urban planners prepare for the future. The foundation’s first project, a life-size prototype of a brick droneport, was presented at the Architecture Biennale in Venice. The project aims to create a network of droneports by 2030 for the purpose of delivering medicines and essential supplies to remote locations in developing countries.
