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57-626: Designed by Lord Foster , it was first known as Torre Repsol and would have served as headquarters for Repsol YPF oil and gas company. During the construction of the tower, Repsol decided to change the location of its future headquarters and the financial institution Caja Madrid purchased the building for € 815 million in August 2007. In 2016 it was bought by Amancio Ortega , Europe's richest man and founder of global fashion group and Zara owner Inditex (ITX.MC), for €490 million euros through his property investment arm, Pontegadea Inmobiliaria, one of

114-775: A bakery making crumpets . During this time, he also studied at the local library in Levenshulme. His talent and hard work was recognised in 1959 when he won £105 and a RIBA silver medal for what he described as "a measured drawing of a windmill ". The windmill he drew was Bourn Windmill , Cambridgeshire . After graduating in 1961, 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

171-586: A full recovery. He also suffered a heart attack. Foster was made a Knight Bachelor in the 1990 Birthday Honours , and thereby granted the title Sir . He was appointed to the Order of Merit (OM) in 1997. In the 1999 Birthday Honours , Foster's elevation to the peerage was announced and he was raised to the peerage as Baron Foster of Thames Bank , of Reddish in the County of Greater Manchester in July. Foster

228-585: 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. Foster gained a reputation for designing office buildings. In the 1980s he designed the HSBC Main Building in Hong Kong for the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation (a founding member of the future HSBC Holdings plc ), at

285-500: A longtime hobby. Upon returning to Manchester, Foster went against his parents' wishes and sought employment elsewhere. He had seven O-levels by this time, and applied to work at a duplicating machine company, telling the interviewer he had applied for the prospect of a company car and a £1,000 salary. Instead, he became an assistant to a contract manager at a local architects, John E. Beardshaw and Partners. The staff advised him that if he wished to become an architect, he should prepare

342-408: A mirror in front of the viewer, it reflected his painting of the buildings which had been seen previously, so that the vanishing point was centered from the perspective of the participant. Brunelleschi applied the new system of perspective to his paintings around 1425. This scenario is indicative, but faces several problems, that are still debated. First of all, nothing can be said for certain about

399-1024: 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. ~ The Gherkin in London. ~The Reichstag Dome in Berlin. ~The Great Court of the British Museum . ~ Hearst Tower in New York. ~The Millennium Bridge in London. ~ Chesa Futura in St. Moritz . ~ Carré d'Art in Nîmes. ~The Bilbao metro . Perspective drawing Linear or point-projection perspective (from Latin perspicere  'to see through')

456-442: A person an object looks N times (linearly) smaller if it has been moved N times further from the eye than the original distance was. The most characteristic features of linear perspective are that objects appear smaller as their distance from the observer increases, and that they are subject to foreshortening , meaning that an object's dimensions parallel to the line of sight appear shorter than its dimensions perpendicular to

513-592: A portfolio of drawings using the perspective and shop drawings from Beardshaw's practice as an example. Beardshaw was so impressed with Foster's drawings that he promoted him to the drawing department. In 1956 Foster began study at the School of Architecture and City Planning , part of the University of Manchester . 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

570-617: A recurring theme in Foster's future projects. After the four separated in 1967, Foster and Wendy founded a new practice, Foster Associates. 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. Foster Associates concentrated on industrial buildings until 1969, when

627-481: A series of experiments between 1415 and 1420, which included making drawings of various Florentine buildings in correct perspective. According to Vasari and Antonio Manetti , in about 1420, Brunelleschi demonstrated his discovery by having people look through a hole in the back of a painting he had made. Through it, they would see a building such as the Florence Baptistery . When Brunelleschi lifted

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684-471: Is based on qualitative judgments, and would need to be faced against the material evaluations that have been conducted on Renaissance perspective paintings. Apart from the paintings of Piero della Francesca , which are a model of the genre, the majority of 15th century works show serious errors in their geometric construction. This is true of Masaccio's Trinity fresco and of many works, including those by renowned artists like Leonardo da Vinci. As shown by

741-669: Is close to an object under observation and directly facing an observer's eyes (i.e., the observer is on a line normal or perpendicular to the plane). Then draw straight lines from the object to the observer. The area on the plane where the drawn lines pass through the plane is a point-projection prospective image resembling what is seen by the observer. Additionally, a central vanishing point can be used (just as with one-point perspective) to indicate frontal (foreshortened) depth. The earliest art paintings and drawings typically sized many objects and characters hierarchically according to their spiritual or thematic importance, not their distance from

798-738: Is evident in Ancient Greek red-figure pottery . Systematic attempts to evolve a system of perspective are usually considered to have begun around the fifth century BC in the art of ancient Greece , as part of a developing interest in illusionism allied to theatrical scenery. This was detailed within Aristotle 's Poetics as skenographia : using flat panels on a stage to give the illusion of depth. The philosophers Anaxagoras and Democritus worked out geometric theories of perspective for use with skenographia . Alcibiades had paintings in his house designed using skenographia , so this art

855-682: Is not a single occurrence of the word "experiment". Fourth, the conditions listed by Manetti are contradictory with each other. For example, the description of the eyepiece sets a visual field of 15°, much narrower than the visual field resulting from the urban landscape described. Soon after Brunelleschi's demonstrations, nearly every interested artist in Florence and in Italy used geometrical perspective in their paintings and sculpture, notably Donatello , Masaccio , Lorenzo Ghiberti , Masolino da Panicale , Paolo Uccello , and Filippo Lippi . Not only

912-590: Is not systematically related to the rest of the composition. Medieval artists in Europe, like those in the Islamic world and China, were aware of the general principle of varying the relative size of elements according to distance, but even more than classical art were perfectly ready to override it for other reasons. Buildings were often shown obliquely according to a particular convention. The use and sophistication of attempts to convey distance increased steadily during

969-495: Is now Grade I listed . The Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts , an art gallery and museum on the campus of the University of East Anglia , Norwich , was one of the first major public buildings to be designed by Foster, completed in 1978, and became grade II* listed in December 2012. In 1981, Foster received a commission for the construction of a new terminal building at London's Stansted Airport . Executed by Foster + Partners,

1026-403: Is one of two types of graphical projection perspective in the graphic arts ; the other is parallel projection . Linear perspective is an approximate representation, generally on a flat surface, of an image as it is seen by the eye . Perspective drawing is useful for representing a three-dimensional scene in a two-dimensional medium, like paper . It is based on the optical fact that for

1083-565: Is recognised as a key figure in British modernist architecture. His architectural practice Foster + Partners , first founded in 1967 as Foster Associates, is the largest in the United Kingdom, and maintains offices internationally. 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

1140-442: Is relatively simple, having been long ago formulated by Euclid. Alberti was also trained in the science of optics through the school of Padua and under the influence of Biagio Pelacani da Parma who studied Alhazen 's Book of Optics . This book, translated around 1200 into Latin, had laid the mathematical foundation for perspective in Europe. Piero della Francesca elaborated on De pictura in his De Prospectiva pingendi in

1197-661: The University of Bath . Foster received The Lynn S. Beedle Lifetime Achievement Award from the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat in 2007 to honour his contributions to the advancement of tall buildings. He was awarded the Aga Khan Award for Architecture , for the University of Technology Petronas in Malaysia, and in 2008 he was granted an honorary degree from the Dundee School of Architecture at

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1254-740: The University of Dundee . In 2009, he received the Prince of Asturias Award in the category 'Arts'. In 2017, he received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement presented by Awards Council member Lord Jacob Rothschild during the International Achievement Summit in London. In 2012, Foster was among the British cultural figures selected by artist Sir Peter Blake to appear in

1311-618: The east doors of the Florence Baptistery . Masaccio (d. 1428) achieved an illusionistic effect by placing the vanishing point at the viewer's eye level in his Holy Trinity ( c.  1427 ), and in The Tribute Money , it is placed behind the face of Jesus. In the late 15th century, Melozzo da Forlì first applied the technique of foreshortening (in Rome, Loreto , Forlì and others). This overall story

1368-435: The 1470s, making many references to Euclid. Alberti had limited himself to figures on the ground plane and giving an overall basis for perspective. Della Francesca fleshed it out, explicitly covering solids in any area of the picture plane. Della Francesca also started the now common practice of using illustrated figures to explain the mathematical concepts, making his treatise easier to understand than Alberti's. Della Francesca

1425-520: The 1990s. Foster + Partners submitted a plan for a 385-metre-tall (1,263 ft) skyscraper, the London Millennium Tower , but its height was seen as excessive for London's skyline. The proposal was scrapped and instead Foster proposed 30 St Mary Axe, popularly referred to as "the gherkin", after its shape. Foster worked with engineers to integrate complex computer systems with the most basic physical laws, such as convection . In 1999,

1482-806: The Apple offices, Apple Campus 2 (now called Apple Park ), in Cupertino, California, US. Apple's board and staff continued to work with Foster as the design was completed and the construction in progress. The circular building was opened to employees in April 2017, six years after Jobs died in 2011. In January 2007, the Sunday Times reported that Foster had called in Catalyst, a corporate finance house, to find buyers for Foster + Partners. Foster does not intend to retire, but rather to sell his 80–90% holding in

1539-497: The biggest property companies in Spain. He purchased the tower from Abu Dhabi tycoon Khadem al-Qubaisi , whose fund had exercised a last-minute purchase option from Spanish lender Bankia (BKIA.MC), its previous owner. It was built by a joint venture of Dragados and Fomento de Construcciones y Contratas . The current name of the tower refers to the former name of the energy company Moeve, previously known as Cepsa, headquartered in

1596-536: The building to enhance the quality of life for the company's 1,200 employees. 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. The design was inspired by the Daily Express Building in Manchester that Foster had admired as a youngster. The building

1653-425: The building, recognised as a landmark work of high-tech architecture, was opened to the public in 1991, and was awarded the 1990 European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture / Mies van der Rohe Award. 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

1710-527: The company valued at £300 million to £500 million. In 2007, he worked with Philippe Starck and Sir Richard Branson of the Virgin Group for the Virgin Galactic plans. 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

1767-682: The company was renamed Foster + Partners . By then, Foster's style had evolved from its earlier sophisticated, machine-influenced high-tech vision into a more sharp-edged modernity. In 2004, Foster designed the tallest bridge in the world , the Millau Viaduct in Southern France , with the Millau Mayor Jacques Godfrain stating; "The architect, Norman Foster, gave us a model of art." Foster worked with Steve Jobs from about 2009 until Jobs' death to design

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1824-518: The completion of the Willis Faber & Dumas headquarters in Ipswich , commissioned in 1970 and completed in 1975. The client, a family-run insurance company, wanted to restore a sense of community to the workplace. 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

1881-461: The correctness of his perspective construction of the Baptistery of San Giovanni, because Brunelleschi's panel is lost. Second, no other perspective painting or drawing by Brunelleschi is known. (In fact, Brunelleschi was not known to have painted at all.) Third, in the account written by Antonio Manetti in his Vita di Ser Brunellesco at the end of the 15th century on Brunelleschi's panel, there

1938-429: The exact vantage point used in the calculations relative to the image. When viewed from a different point, this cancels out what would appear to be distortions in the image. For example, a sphere drawn in perspective will be stretched into an ellipse. These apparent distortions are more pronounced away from the center of the image as the angle between a projected ray (from the scene to the eye) becomes more acute relative to

1995-595: The first or second century until the 18th century. It is not certain how they came to use the technique; Dubery and Willats (1983) speculate that the Chinese acquired the technique from India, which acquired it from Ancient Rome, while others credit it as an indigenous invention of Ancient China . Oblique projection is also seen in Japanese art, such as in the Ukiyo-e paintings of Torii Kiyonaga (1752–1815). By

2052-452: The four founders of Team 4, died from cancer in 1989. From 1991 to 1995, Foster was married to Begum Sabiha Rumani Malik. The marriage ended in divorce. In 1996, Foster married Spanish psychologist and art curator Elena Ochoa . He has five children; two of the four sons he had with Cheesman are adopted. In the 2000s, Foster was diagnosed with bowel cancer and was told he had weeks to live. He received chemotherapy treatment and made

2109-657: The future'. The foundation, which opened in June 2017, is based in Madrid and operates globally. Foster was awarded the Pritzker Prize in 1999. Norman Robert Foster was born in 1935 in Reddish , two miles (3.2 km) north of Stockport , then a part of Lancashire . He was the only child of Robert and Lilian Foster (née Smith). The family moved to Levenshulme , near Manchester , where they lived in poverty. His father

2166-529: The later periods of antiquity, artists, especially those in less popular traditions, were well aware that distant objects could be shown smaller than those close at hand for increased realism, but whether this convention was actually used in a work depended on many factors. Some of the paintings found in the ruins of Pompeii show a remarkable realism and perspective for their time. It has been claimed that comprehensive systems of perspective were evolved in antiquity, but most scholars do not accept this. Hardly any of

2223-527: The line of sight. All objects will recede to points in the distance, usually along the horizon line, but also above and below the horizon line depending on the view used. Italian Renaissance painters and architects including Filippo Brunelleschi , Leon Battista Alberti , Masaccio , Paolo Uccello , Piero della Francesca and Luca Pacioli studied linear perspective, wrote treatises on it, and incorporated it into their artworks. linear or point-projection perspective works by putting an imagery flat plane that

2280-540: The many works where such a system would have been used have survived. A passage in Philostratus suggests that classical artists and theorists thought in terms of "circles" at equal distance from the viewer, like a classical semi-circular theatre seen from the stage. The roof beams in rooms in the Vatican Virgil , from about 400 AD, are shown converging, more or less, on a common vanishing point, but this

2337-481: The period, but without a basis in a systematic theory. Byzantine art was also aware of these principles, but also used the reverse perspective convention for the setting of principal figures. Ambrogio Lorenzetti painted a floor with convergent lines in his Presentation at the Temple (1342), though the rest of the painting lacks perspective elements. It is generally accepted that Filippo Brunelleschi conducted

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2394-547: The practice worked on the administrative and leisure centre for Fred. Olsen Lines based in the London Docklands , which integrated workers and managers within the same office space. 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. The practice's breakthrough project in England followed in 1974 with

2451-406: The quick proliferation of accurate perspective paintings in Florence, Brunelleschi likely understood (with help from his friend the mathematician Toscanelli ), but did not publish, the mathematics behind perspective. Decades later, his friend Leon Battista Alberti wrote De pictura ( c.  1435 ), a treatise on proper methods of showing distance in painting. Alberti's primary breakthrough

2508-571: The suggestion of Yale art historian Vincent Scully , the pair travelled across America for a year to study architecture. 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 . Among their first projects was the Cockpit, a minimalist glass bubble installed in Cornwall, the features of which became

2565-494: The time the most expensive building ever constructed. The building is marked by its high level of light transparency, as all 3500 workers have a view to Victoria Peak or Victoria Harbour . Foster said that if the firm had not won the contract it would probably have been bankrupted. Foster was assigned the brief for a development on the site of the Baltic Exchange, which had been damaged beyond repair by an IRA bomb, in

2622-420: The tower. https://www.structuresinsider.com/post/torre-cepsa-tower-skyscraper-in-madrid-spain [REDACTED] Media related to Torre Cepsa, Madrid at Wikimedia Commons Norman Foster, Baron Foster of Thames Bank Norman Robert Foster, Baron Foster of Thames Bank (born 1 June 1935) is an English architect and designer. Closely associated with the development of high-tech architecture , Foster

2679-455: The viewer, and did not use foreshortening. The most important figures are often shown as the highest in a composition , also from hieratic motives, leading to the so-called "vertical perspective", common in the art of Ancient Egypt , where a group of "nearer" figures are shown below the larger figure or figures; simple overlapping was also employed to relate distance. Additionally, oblique foreshortening of round elements like shields and wheels

2736-438: 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 , 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

2793-586: The world. He has also been on the Board of Trustees of The Architecture Foundation . Foster believes that attracting young talent is essential, and is proud that the average age of people working for Foster and Partners is 32, just like it was in 1967. In May 2022, it was announced that Foster would help plan reconstruction in Ukraine after the end of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine . Foster has been married three times. His first wife, Wendy Cheesman , one of

2850-663: Was a machine painter at the Metropolitan-Vickers works in Trafford Park , which influenced Norman to take up engineering, design, and, ultimately, architecture. His mother worked in a local bakery. Foster's parents were diligent and hard workers who often had neighbours and family members look after her son, which Foster later believed restricted his relationship with his mother and father. Foster attended Burnage Grammar School for Boys in Burnage , where he

2907-462: Was also the first to accurately draw the Platonic solids as they would appear in perspective. Luca Pacioli 's 1509 Divina proportione ( Divine Proportion ), illustrated by Leonardo da Vinci , summarizes the use of perspective in painting, including much of Della Francesca's treatise. Leonardo applied one-point perspective as well as shallow focus to some of his works. Two-point perspective

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2964-493: Was bullied by fellow pupils and took up reading. He considered himself quiet and awkward in his early years. 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. In 1953, Foster completed his national service in the Royal Air Force , choosing the air force because aircraft had been

3021-461: Was demonstrated as early as 1525 by Albrecht Dürer , who studied perspective by reading Piero and Pacioli's works, in his Unterweisung der Messung ("Instruction of the Measurement"). Perspective images are created with reference to a particular center of vision for the picture plane. In order for the resulting image to appear identical to the original scene, a viewer must view the image from

3078-632: Was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy (ARA) on 19 May 1983, and a Royal Academician (RA) on 26 June 1991. In 1995, he was elected an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (HonFREng). On 24 April 2017, he was given the Freedom of the City of London . The Bloomberg London building received a Stirling Prize in October 2018. In 1986 he received an Honorary Doctorate from

3135-482: Was not confined merely to the stage. Euclid in his Optics ( c.  300 BC ) argues correctly that the perceived size of an object is not related to its distance from the eye by a simple proportion. In the first-century BC frescoes of the Villa of P. Fannius Synistor , multiple vanishing points are used in a systematic but not fully consistent manner. Chinese artists made use of oblique projection from

3192-423: Was not to show the mathematics in terms of conical projections, as it actually appears to the eye. Instead, he formulated the theory based on planar projections, or how the rays of light, passing from the viewer's eye to the landscape, would strike the picture plane (the painting). He was then able to calculate the apparent height of a distant object using two similar triangles. The mathematics behind similar triangles

3249-468: Was perspective a way of showing depth, it was also a new method of creating a composition. Visual art could now depict a single, unified scene, rather than a combination of several. Early examples include Masolino's St. Peter Healing a Cripple and the Raising of Tabitha ( c.  1423 ), Donatello's The Feast of Herod ( c.  1427 ), as well as Ghiberti's Jacob and Esau and other panels from

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