I'm Norman Foster. I'm here in our main studio in London and I'm answering questions from AD Architectural Digest. We are all of us fired by the prospect of design and realizing design. At the same time, we question, we challenge, and wherever possible, we innovate, we try to make change for good. But we're always aware of the historical dimension, whether that's cities in crisis, which always bounce back more strongly. Whether that's Lisbon earthquakes, the birth of seismic structures, whether it's cholera in London, New York realizing the reservoir, Central Park, creating the Thames Embankment, modern sanitation, whether it's the great fire of London that created the terraces. In all of these cases, and I could give you more examples, the lesson of history is that cities bounce back stronger.
We were really quite desperate for work. We were in something called a bedsit, a very small apartment. That was our office. I was teaching part-time, my late wife, because Wendy and I founded the practice. She was working in an architect's office and I was teaching part-time. And one of the students, his father worked in Docklands and said, 'I know that Fred Olsen, the shipping company, is talking to builders about a shower block, a bathroom on the site. And I could get you a meeting with the dock manager.' Now that, when you think about it, is perhaps the most humble project that you could imagine, and I went for it.
Design is really the social agenda. Design is to improve the quality of our lives. Improve it materially, improve it spiritually. It's about concepts of beauty. It's about convenience. And technology is the means to those social ends, which is about innovation. And of course that's linked to sustainability. And sustainability is linked to nature because if you're working with nature, you're reducing energy, you're creating healthier buildings.
We have been using AI for some time. That technology is not new. Of course, it's much more powerful, has greater capability. We've seen since starting in practice, everything was hand-drawn. It's now on a screen. And all the themes of sustainability at that time were a fringe activity. Now it's absolutely mainstream and normal. So with time, the context has changed, but we have not changed in terms of our philosophy. The human element, the contact: if you were commissioning a building or if you were a user in a building, you would have needs. We would have a conversation about that. If it's a city, it's a community. And if you're using the power, the digital power, to be able to show how making a positive change here, planting more trees here, changing the traffic pattern, you don't have to do it to find out whether it's effective. You can actually anticipate that by modeling it. So all of these tools can engage a community in a bottom-up approach to making changes to make the city more healthy.
Go for any project which presents an opportunity to design, and nothing can be too humble. To the young individual or individuals who are starting a practice: nothing is wasted. Dare to take risks. And don't be ashamed of failure. Failure is only bad if you don't learn from it. So if you really do it well, nothing is wasted. So if you enter a competition and you don't win that competition, if you've really done justice to it, you will learn something and that will then inform something else. And with the passage of time, I guarantee you will look back on that time when you were really sad and depressed. 'My god, we've lost.' But the reality is that you may not have won the competition, but you've won something more precious.
There was one project for a national German athletic stadium that would have been built in Frankfurt, and it was the end of that analog period. So everything was done by hand, and there were probably several thousand little model people in that stadium. And the engineer who worked with me on that project, Jack Zuns, sadly no longer with us, said, 'Norman, in my career, if there was one project that I'd really like to see built, it's that project.'
It's a very, very difficult question because, as you say, it's almost like saying choose your favorite child. I'd probably come at it more obliquely. I start to say, well, if I think of one project that perhaps ticks more boxes than any other, I think the Reichstag in terms of its historical dimension, the way in which it seeks to wipe out a past that was pretty awful in terms of historic background. So in a way it is erased, and it's erased by Christo and Jeanne-Claude with the wrapping, in a way a symbolic new life. But then that cupola with its cone which reflects natural light and which extracts air, pulls air through the building, is part of the ecology which makes it virtually a zero-carbon building. So it's a clean energy manifesto, and this is going back to the 1990s. But above all, it is democracy in action on the skyline, and the public are symbolically above the politicians who are answerable to them. I probably select the Sainsbury Centre because it was the first public building and it's about culture. It's about bringing together public galleries with a teaching facility for students all under one roof. And it was for Lord and Lady Sainsbury, who became Bob and Lisa, and were like the grandparents that I never had. So there's a very personal dimension to that building. And then I'd start to say the same thing perhaps about the Millennium Bridge and the way in which it connects the prosperous North Bank, the financial heart of London, with traditionally the poorest South Bank. So it's a social equalizer, but it's also about pedestrianization. And it's about a new perspective on the river and a new kind of suspension bridge, and that's had a dramatic effect not only on the South Bank itself socially, it's brought more people and it's created hotels, but it's also increased St. Paul's in terms of its attraction, the modern number of visitors. So again, working at many levels.
In Madrid in 2017, there was a big event in the opera house, 2,000 young people, and one person said, 'You, Norman Foster, what advice would you give to a graduate, to somebody graduating?' And I, without hesitation because it was instinctive, I said the advice that I would give myself: stay a student. And then what do I mean by stay a student? I mean dare to challenge, dare to question, be curious, be hungry, but above all be humble.
