He is the president of the Norman Foster Foundation, created to 'promote interdisciplinary thinking and research to help new generations of architects, designers and urbanists to anticipate the future'.

Norman Robert Foster was born in 1935 in Reddish, two miles (3.2 km) north of Stockport, then a part of Lancashire.

[3][4] His father was a machine painter at the Metropolitan-Vickers works in Trafford Park, which influenced Norman to take up engineering, design, and, ultimately, architecture.

[9] At 16, he left school and passed an entrance exam for a trainee scheme set up by Manchester Town Hall, which led to his first job, an office junior and clerk in the treasurer's department.

He was ineligible for a maintenance grant, so he took part-time jobs to fund his studies, including an ice-cream salesman, bouncer, and night shifts at a bakery making crumpets.

[19] After graduating in 1961,[5] Foster won the Henry Fellowship to the Yale School of Architecture in New Haven, Connecticut, where he met future business partner Richard Rogers and earned his master's degree.

At the suggestion of Yale art historian Vincent Scully, the pair travelled across America for a year to study architecture.

[20] In 1963 Foster returned to the UK and established his own architectural firm Team 4, with Rogers, Su Brumwell, and the sisters Georgie and Wendy Cheesman.

From 1968 to 1983, Foster collaborated with American architect Richard Buckminster Fuller on several projects that became catalysts in the development of an environmentally sensitive approach to design, such as the Samuel Beckett Theatre at St Peter's College, Oxford.

[20] This was followed, in 1970, by the world's first inflatable office building for Computer Technology Limited near Hemel Hempstead, which housed 70 employees for a year.

In response, Foster designed a space with modular, open plan office floors, long before open-plan became the norm, and placed a roof garden, 25-metre swimming pool, and gymnasium in the building to enhance the quality of life for the company's 1,200 employees.

[23] The building has a full-height glass façade moulded to the medieval street plan and contributes drama, subtly shifting from opaque, reflective black to a glowing back-lit transparency as the sun sets.

As part of the project's development, in 1988 Foster and British artist Brian Clarke made several proposals for an integral stained glass artwork for the terminal building; the principal proposal would have seen the walls of the terminal's east and west elevations clad in two sequences of traditionally mouth-blown, leaded glass.

For complex technical and security reasons, the original scheme, which Clarke considered to be his magnum opus,[26] couldn't be executed.

Though unrealised, the collaboration is historically significant for its scale, its introduction of colour and materials broadly viewed as antithetical to high-tech architecture into a key work of that movement, and for having been the first time in the history of stained glass that computer-assisted design had been utilised in the creative process.

[33] Foster currently sits on the board of trustees at architectural charity Article 25 who design, construct and manage innovative, safe, sustainable buildings in some of the most inhospitable and unstable regions of the world.

[52][53] In 2012, Foster was among the British cultural figures selected by artist Sir Peter Blake to appear in a new version of his most famous artwork – the Beatles' Sgt.

Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover – to celebrate the British cultural figures of his life that he most admires.