This exhibition includes two hundred drawings chart half a century devoted to architecture. From his formative years to the leadership of a firm that builds around the world, the dialogue between the eye and the hand through a pencil has been for Norman Foster a tool of analysis and pedagogy, useful for the conception of the works and the explanation of his intentions. Since many of the initial sketches are contained in the notebooks that the architect always carries, the exhibition includes fifty of them; and since all this graphic production is nothing but a device for the construction of buildings, displayed
here are also half a dozen models that remind of the three-dimensional nature of architecture, no matter how often it begins in the humble two-dimensional support that paper provides. But a close observation of the traces can shed light on the creative process that has given rise to some of the masterpieces of the 20th century, and also show the capacity of architecture to improve our cities and our lives.
Becoming an architect. Drawing towards the project:
The sketching of vernacular, historical and contemporary buildings during his European travels is the training ground for the development of the analytical and imaginative skills that will allow the student to undertake his first projects, in his home city of Manchester and later at Yale University.