‘Norman Foster’ Review: From Blueprints to Modern Marvels

Paris

If globalization were a building, it would be designed by Norman Foster. From Park Avenue skyscrapers to Beijing’s airport, a London bridge and France’s Millau Viaduct, Europe’s tallest and most graceful bridge, Mr. Foster’s Space Age modernism shapes our vision of the present.

Curated by Frédéric Migayrou of the Pompidou Center with Foster + Partners and the Norman Foster Foundation, and covering more than 20,000 square feet, “Norman Foster” comprises two large spaces, a dark gallery and a light-filled exhibition hall. The walls of the gallery are lined floor to ceiling with hand-drawn blueprints, from early commissions (converting old barns, a two-door garage at the side of Mr. Hamill’s house in Derby), to Apple’s circular, spaceship-like headquarters (2017) in Cupertino, Calif., co-designed with Steve Jobs.

Born in Manchester, England, in 1935, Mr. Foster was the son of a baker and a factory painter at the Metropolitan-Vickers works in nearby Trafford Park. These industrial environs prefigured the merger of modernist principle and commercial design in his work, where clean lines serve clear purposes. In Mr. Foster’s wartime childhood, a geodesic skeleton made the Wellington bomber famously resilient; today, the geodesic latticework of Mr. Foster’s roofs illuminates airports from China to Kuwait. In 1961, an architecture fellowship took him to Yale, where he met another English student, Richard Rogers. Their partnership, Team 4, launched in London in 1963.

The Paris exhibition’s long central display case is packed with pages from Mr. Foster’s notebooks (including a quick sketch of Richard and Su Rogers’s and Renzo Piano’s Pompidou Center). If you zigzag between the display case and the walls, you see how the designs emanate from consistent principles in the notebooks. The polyhedral glass roof and sliding canopy of The Cockpit (1964), a house embedded into a Cornish hillside, evoke the cockpit of a Hawker Hurricane fighter plane. The design of the Torre de Collserola (1992), the communications tower that, anchored by steel cables, seems to hover on a hill overlooking Barcelona, echoes the Skylon, the floating, cigar-like “Vertical Feature” that symbolized the modernist aspirations of 1951’s Festival of Britain.

Team 4’s last major project, a 1966 factory in Swindon, Wiltshire, was a square hangar with a glass wall. Mr. Foster’s solo flight as an architect took off where Team 4 ended. His signatures, a cantilevered roof and an open-plan, flexible interior, cohered in an unrealized 1967 design for a Welsh school, were first used in an interim IBM head office (1971), and then evolved into curves and ellipses in the public commissions of the 1990s. Another unrealized project, a modular London house with an externalized load-bearing grid (1979), anticipates Mr. Foster’s first skyscraper, the 47-story HSBC headquarters in Hong Kong (1986).

In the Pompidou exhibition hall, models of the HSBC building and other Foster skyscrapers are paraded in front of the windows overlooking northern Paris. Nearby, we see the early convergences of modernist art and industrial design that shaped Mr. Foster’s style. The Futurist ellipse of Brancusi’s “Bird in Space” (1928), which prefigured the Skylon, anticipates the steely functionality of a Hamilton Standard propeller (1941). The sharp lines of a Voisin C7 car (1925) soften into the humpbacked Dymaxion (1933) by Mr. Foster’s friend and mentor R. Buckminster Fuller, with whom he collaborated for the last 12 years of the latter’s life.

While the gallery traces how sketches become designs, the exhibition hall shows the principles that convert two-dimensional designs into three-dimensional buildings, represented here by architect’s models, and how buildings interact with their locations. A series of thematic zones elucidates the influence of Fuller (“Nature and Urbanity,” “Networks and Mobility”), and how the built environment and local requirements (“Sites and Planning”) reconcile the tension between “History and Tradition” and “The Vertical City.”

The architect’s models are miniature epics, giving a bird’s-eye view of buildings usually seen from the ground. The lateral decks of the Commerzbank headquarters in Frankfurt (1997), the world’s first “ecological skyscraper,” include miniature gardens. Apple’s headquarters resemble a 1950s UFO, docked in a primeval wood. The empty workstations and meeting rooms in Bloomberg’s London headquarters (2017) expose their complexity of design and function.

Architectural integrations such as the undulating geodesic canopies over the British Museum’s Great Court (2000) and the Kogod Courtyard (2007), which is shared by two Smithsonian museums, are best experienced from within. But the armadillo-like carapace of glass plates on the philological library of the Free University of Berlin (2005) and the triple-winged boomerang that is Kuwait International Airport (to be completed in 2025) must be seen from the sky. The same goes for the integration of new designs into built environments. The visitor to “Norman Foster” sees the tiny figures who climb the glass and steel cupola of Berlin’s restored Reichstag (1999) as Mr. Foster envisioned them.

If you drive over the implausibly light Millau Viaduct (2004), you can appreciate a reduced journey time and admire the seven slender pylons whose white guy wires carry the bridge 1.5 miles across the Tarn river gorge. But you won’t see how each pylon emerges from a muscular concrete pillar beneath the roadway, or how two of those pillars are almost as tall as the Eiffel Tower. As with a math exam, the model shows Mr. Foster’s mind at work.

—Mr. Green is a Journal contributor and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society.