The Globe and Mail

Norman Foster

Superstar architects are given permission to play and to dream. The rest are punished for reverie. And there you have it: How wonderful and unfair the design world can be. Norman Foster is one of the blessed, a brilliant thinker who has enjoyed more aura than trauma since setting up his London studio in 1967. Though his iconic buildings grace much of the planet, it's only now, as conjurer of urban visions in Toronto, Vancouver and Calgary, that Foster and Partners has seriously begun to infiltrate Canada. It's well understood that by partnering closely with the boldest engineers, Foster has gained a reputation over the last three decades as an innovator. He is to architecture what Picasso was to modern art. With Foster and Partners, there has been a consistent reinvention of building types: the airport (Stansted Airport, near London), the sustainable commercial tower (Commerzbank in Frankfurt), the corporate icon (the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank) and urban place-making through the reinvention of a cultural monument (the Carré d'art in Nîmes, France, and the British Museum's Great Court in London). Along the way, clients were required to leave banality in the dust and indulge the creative process -- which is what they did. About 600 people now work for the Foster studio.