“It’s about challenges, it’s the poetic dimension, something I never tire of, never will.” Looking back on his life and career, British architect Norman Foster is exceedingly erudite, and not a little aware of his effects. While the most obvious of these has to do with the many structures he has designed — university campuses and bridges, museums and airports — others are less material, the ways his work and ethos have inspired others.
Such inspiration is the focus of the documentary How Much Does Your Building Weigh, Mr. Foster?, titled after a question posed by Buckminster Fuller and showcasing not questions but proclamations by Foster’s colleagues and admirers. “If you look at how Norman looks, always dressed in a particular kind of style, it reflects the qualities of his architecture very much,” begins narrator Deyan Sudjic. “It has that sense of doing things precisely, carefully, consideredly.”
As Sudjic speaks, you see Foster from a distance, an elegant figure framed by a wide window, snowy mountains stretching behind him. He’s on his cellphone, he’s near a balcony railing, and as the camera makes its way from the interior of the Chesa Futura apartment building to the balcony, to show Foster first reflected in that window and then embodied, Sudjic continues, “You could also say that there’s something about his architecture which is hard to read. How do you understand a building which is a black glass curved screen?”
It’s a good question. And while the film provides any number of commentaries on the majesty and wonder of Foster’s work, none of these verbal summaries is definitive. In part, this is the problem of writing about architecture (perhaps not so unlike dancing about it), a problem of translation across dimensions. But it also has to do with other generic limitations, how biography and documentary might intersect but also elude one another, how a life and a life’s work remain disparate, despite and because of seemingly self-evident connections.
The film doesn’t grapple with these questions per se. Rather, it gestures toward connections, and at its best, lets the architecture — and some stunning imagery of same — speak more or less for itself. Thus, camera looks up at the Hearst Tower in Manhattan (2006), pans across the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts at Norwich, England (1978), floats over and under the dramatic Millau Viaduct in France (1993). If each shows Foster’s grappling with constructions in space, each is also a step in an ongoing process, as his imagination and the possibilities offered by advancing technologies shift over time.
How Much Does Your Building Weigh, Mr. Foster? doesn’t so much work through or even contemplate these steps as it suggests they might have taken place. Foster offers a few personal stories — surviving the Blitz (“I remember hearing bombers go over the house with my mother”), coming to architecture (informed by an employer at John Beardshaw & Partners that he would need a portfolio, he asked, “What’s a portfolio?”), starting his own firm, Foster Associates, with his wife Wendy Cheesman (“We had no work and there were no associates”) — but more often the movie offers a survey of the structures, noting the challenges they pose. These appear in timelapsed images and spectacular wide shots, reminding you that you are looking at “the poetic dimension.”
Foster’s list of projects is remarkable. Some have been new buildings, like Swiss Re tower (2004), the Great Court at the British Museum in London (2000), and the world’s largest building, the Beijing Airport (2008), as well as redevelopments and reconstructions, like the Dresden Railway Station (2006) or the Reichstag, completed in 1999. In describing such projects, the narration can turn coy: after Foster says of the Reichstag project, “I remember saying, ‘There is no way I’m going to be party to recreating a symbol that was of the emperor past,” Sudjic poses a puzzle, as if you haven’t just heard Foster’s answer: “The question for Foster is, ‘Do you restore the damage? Do you take what’s left of the old building and make it look new again or do you show what’s happened to that building?” But then the camera begins to track through the building, completed, and you see some of his solutions.
As Foster puts it, his solutions are individual for each site and conjured collectively. He extols the benefits of surrounding himself with young architects and designers at Foster + Partners, now the ninth largest practice in the world. (Several employees confirm how great it is to work with him, and we take their word for it.) Foster + Partners is the latest incarnation of his company, transformed since Wendy died in 1989. This change in Foster’s life is treated by the film in cursory manner (“She became sick,” says Sudjic, “She had cancer. She died”), and Foster himself doesn’t dwell on it. “It still has a tragic dimension if you look back on it,” he says, “But at the same time, life has moved on, as we’ve all moved on, and you have a better measure of satisfaction of friendship of love of whatever.”
Just so, the film doesn’t detail Foster’s life apart from architecture, it doesn’t remark his subsequent marriages or mention his five children. When it does cite his own health issues — his fight with bowel cancer and his heart attack — these serve as examples of the resilience his lack of self-reflection might indicate. At 75, he’s still entering cross-country ski marathons.
Most recently, the film shows, he’s been advocating for green technologies, exemplified by the the Masdar Development in Abu Dhabi (2007). Foster acknowledges the political complexities and obstacles of such projects, as brilliant and necessary as they may be, and he exhorts world leaders and others responsible for building decisions to think ahead. In the not so distant future, he says, we will be asking, “Did everybody wake up in time or did they wake up too late?” He, of course, believes he is awake in time.