Norman Foster Design Quotations

As an architect you design for the present, with an awareness of the past, for a future which is essentially unknown.

I describe the design process as like the tip of the iceberg. What you don't see is the long haul: all the endless auditing and things like that.

Everything we design is a response to the specific climate and culture of a particular place.

I was born in 1935, and as far back as I can remember, I was sketching designs. My first subject was an aircraft, which I imagined myself piloting.

When the Great Fire of London destroyed most of the medieval city in 1666, Christopher Wren was invited to design a new one. Within days, he had drawn up an elegant grid of broad boulevards leading to majestic squares, but it came to nothing - the existing landowners wanted things as they had been.