This New Yorker article about Norman Foster is one of the best things I've ever read. He's a fantastic subject; he's done a lot, there are many opinions about him and he's a compelling combination of terrible and effective.
But, also, it's incredibly well-written. Such phrase-making, such brilliant summing up.
Some choice bits:
"Michael Bloomberg once described his collaboration with Foster, on a European headquarters in London, as one between “a billionaire who wanted to be an architect and an architect who wanted to be a billionaire.”
"To build a very large operation that still resembles a boutique one required decades of sustained control. Foster has controlled the work, and controlled his image, and controlled the images made by him: a Foster + Partners project will almost always have its accompanying Norman Foster sketches, often made retrospectively, rather than in the heat of design. They’ll be annotated by Foster, in a spiky hand that some of his colleagues have learned to imitate. These images may show a building’s future users spreading their arms above their heads, in a gesture of joyous abandon that it’s hard to imagine Foster ever having made."
"Foster shares with Steven Spielberg an ability to deliver “massive blockbusters that are also aesthetically and artistically successful."
"Foster expects to reach the end of his paragraphs, and talks over attempted interruptions with unmusical steeliness."
"The contrasts in the marriage can sometimes seem derived from hackneyed national stereotypes about introversion and extroversion. Elena used to host a popular Spanish TV show called “Let’s Talk About Sex.”"
"She recalled once instructing him to put down his pencil and pay attention to her. Foster tends to keep a cloth-covered sketchbook nearby. He had protested that he’d been listening to her carefully, and could repeat what she’d just said. Elena replied, “I need you to hear me with your eyes!”"
"...last summer, I joined a few of Foster’s video meetings with colleagues. Sometimes his interventions were specific and small-scale: he asked about the legibility of the lettering on the exterior of a school theatre in Connecticut, and about the parking lot out front. “Not to distract us now, but just consider if the neck to that car park was tightened,” he said. At other times, Foster’s interventions had more drama. Once, invoking Roger Ridsdill Smith, the firm’s most senior structural engineer, he said of a tower design, “I think I’d pull Roger in and look at it being a balanced cantilever.” I identified a catchphrase: “It’s worth a study.” You could almost hear the dinner reservations being cancelled.
His remarks never sounded capricious; nor did they seem unwelcome. This is the core of the business: people draw ten versions of a stairway, or a lobby, and agree to develop the best one, and then someone—possibly Lord Foster—starts to wonder about an eleventh version. Foster is very good at designing. But he’s also very good at making others not stop designing."
I should stop now. It's very long, there's so much of it. But it's so good.