Discover Norman Foster’s manifesto for Domus 2024

The British architect will lead our magazine for an entire year, and like his illustrious predecessors, has previewed it with words and images.

The tradition of guest editors starting with a manifesto leads me to reflect on how we live in a future that past generations could only imagine in their wildest dreams. What we take for granted today would be way beyond their comprehension – truly, it would be like magic.

Could they have ever believed that pressing something called a switch would deliver instant light, heat and coolness, and even cook food without lighting a fire? Or that by turning a knob, they could enjoy a continuous stream of water at arm’s length? What about the idea of a bathroom with modern sanitation, or the miracles of modern medicine?

All of this magic – the magic of our technology today – is our unspoken and unappreciated luxury.To one degree or another, much of what I have described is presently denied to more than one billion people living in informal settlements, around a seventh of today’s humanity.1

We must try to separate hope, fashion and prejudice from fact. We must confront the realities of truthful data.

To address this inequality, to provide for the anticipated three more billion in population growth, and to preserve the quality of life for the rest of us, we need an abundance of electrical energy – but clean energy. 
Dirty energy pollutes and kills. Seven million die prematurely every year through bad air – mostly children through the burning of wood, coal or animal waste for heating and cooking.2

Contrary to popular perception, our use of fossil fuels is rising. Only 10.5 per cent of global energy is produced by solar and wind (and it needs a fossil-fuel backup).3,4 If the batteries of our electric vehicles are filled with electricity made from a dirty source (as in more than 60 per cent of global supply) then they are dirty vehicles. 

Meanwhile, as we blight our precious habitat with a carpet of short-life solar panels  and noisy, unsightly wind turbines, we ignore sources that are statistically safer, more sustainable, reliable and infinitely more discreet.

As I will try to communicate in this series, we must try to separate hope, fashion  and prejudice from fact. We must confront the realities of truthful data.

Our world of buildings leads us to the city. Infrastructure is the urban glue that binds the individual structures together – the public spaces, the boulevards, streets, squares and bridges, the terminals and metro systems that provide connectivity. With the buildings, these determine the city’s identity, its DNA, quality of life and carbon footprint.

The cities with the lowest carbon footprint and the highest quality of life are compact and walkable, medium to high density in terms of the number of people per square kilometre. They are likely to have neighbourhoods with a mix of activities close together, well served by good public transport. These are the opposite of sprawling car-based cities. 

If we defer to the natural landscape, how do we site the human-made object, be it a tiny gazebo, a major building, or a heroic work of infrastructure?

Statistically, compact cities are the most popular kind of place to visit or live. I discovered this intuitively as a student in the summer of 1959 when I researched and analysed nine public spaces in six cities across Europe. Enlightened urban design and master plans are critical to successful cities as they change and evolve over time.

If these are the most desirable cities, then what is the equivalent in terms of buildings? From the first days of practising architecture, I have believed that a building with natural light and sun, fresh air, a view and nature would be beautiful, spiritually beneficial and healthy. The manipulation of light and views is central to the poetic dimension of architecture. 

Six decades later we now have scientific proof that such buildings are indeed healthier and more productive. Even patients recovering from surgery in a room with a view, especially of nature, leave hospital earlier than those facing a blank wall. I have found nature to be a prime generator of form, a catalyst for innovation.

One example is our reinvention of the airport terminal by opening its roof to the sun and sky. This improves the traveller’s wellbeing and experience; it reduces energy demands and carbon footprint. If we defer to the natural landscape, how do we site the human-made object, be it a tiny gazebo, a major building, or a heroic work of infrastructure? Depending on the circumstances, our projects move between the two polarities of touching the ground lightly and nestling into it so that landscape and architecture are one. A compact city, built as mentioned earlier, preserves precious countryside and the biodiversity upon which it depends.

Through my writing, my awareness of the natural world as an ecosystem coincided with my start as an architect. It may explain why I see design, particularly in a building, as the integration of systems – systems of structure, enclosure, heating, cooling, lighting and so on. In the quest for elegance, economy and performance, the ultimate integration of systems means doing more with less. What is true of a building is true of a city in terms of recycling, energy consumption and carbon footprint. 

How can we, in a time of climate change, separate fact from fiction, and emotion and prejudice from truthful data?

I find architectural inspiration in the expression of some systems and the ephemeralisation of others. The expression and celebration of the structure is one recurring theme. In those kinds of buildings, the structure becomes the architecture, and the architecture is the structure. This tradition is timeless. The expressed steel structures of today could be the masonry of the Middle Ages with Gothic cathedrals supported by flying buttresses framing vast planes of stained glass.

However, circumstances of the programme and other factors can lead to the suppression of the structure and instead the expression of the skin or enclosure of a building. This visual categorisation of buildings was coined by one distinguished critic as “skin and bones”.

Inspirations abound from the history of architecture, as well as design. I could give endless examples from the worlds of locomotives, flying machines and automobiles. I have always questioned the silos that divide architecture, art and design. My belief is that they are all an integral part of the culture of our visual world.

This holistic view of design led me, from the beginning, to include other professional skills such as engineering and costing up front as part of the creative team rather than following the traditional model of passive involvement later. That approach empowers the architect through wider knowledge of the issues that generate design early enough in the creative process. My metaphor for this philosophy is the round table.

The practice of architecture is impacted by social and technological change. That tendency is not new, although perhaps the rate of change has recently assumed a new magnitude. This pattern has heightened the mismatch between the education of those responsible for the built environment and the subsequent realities of practice in the real world. How can we share the lessons of hard-won experience, success and failure to better prepare younger generations to be enlightened civic leaders in the future? How can we, in a time of climate change, separate fact from fiction, and emotion and prejudice from truthful data? These and other concerns have led to the creation of the Norman Foster Foundation and its Institute for Sustainable Cites, and that is another manifesto in itself.

1. World Cities Report 2022, Envisaging the Future of Cities, page 348.
2. Gina McCarthy: “It’s time to admit that our health and climate crises are one.” Financial Times, 6 November 2023. Original Source: World Health Organisation: “The combined effects of ambient air pollution and household air pollution is associated with 7 million premature deaths annually.”
3. “With nearly 3,000 tera-watt-hours of electricity produced, wind and solar accounted for a combined 10.5 per cent of global 2021 generation, BNEF foundin its annual Power Transition Trends report, 21 September 2022.” Sofia Maia and Luiza Demôro, BloombergNEF.
4. “62 per cent of the world’s electricity came from fossil fuels in 2021, up from 61per cent in 2020.” Ember, Global Electricity Review 2022, page 7.

Speciale Guest Editor

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