Obama in 2009 taking a weeklong vacation at the home that Norman Foster bought two years later.
Photo: Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images
Norman Foster lives in an 18th-century Swiss château, drives a white Citroën Méhari, dines regularly with King Charles and David Hockney, and recently took a family vacation to Lake Como where he stayed in a villa that appears in Succession. It’s a level of fancy so unusual for an architect that The New Yorker put it at the center of a piece that dropped this week, and argues Foster achieved it through the kind of obsessive control that also led him to once cook pesto by counting out “more than a hundred basil leaves, one by one.” “He cares about food, in a Norman Foster way,” says the chef Ruthie Rogers, who witnessed the scene.
We broke down the fun.
Foster may be the master architect of pristine glass boxes, but he vacations in a schlocky farmhouse built in the 1990s to resemble the house in Field of Dreams. It’s on Martha’s Vineyard, and is best known as the rental that the Obamas used as a “de facto summer White House” during his first term. The owners sold it in 2011 to Foster, who tells Parker that he later met the president at “a neighbor’s home,” where Obama suggests that Foster rent it back to them — a request made with a “jokey pressure” that Foster found “amusing.” He said no. Instead, he ripped out the Obama ephemera left behind at an outbuilding — an “absurd amount of wiring” that he speculates “must have been related to communications and security.”
Obama outside one of the outbuildings on the 28-acre compound.
Photo: Jewel Samad/AFP/Gety Images
270 Park Avenue in August 2024. JPMorgan Chase is planning to move in this summer.
Photo: Alamy
The new JPMorgan Chase tower rising in midtown looks designed for the Harkonnen — dark, shiny, cantilevered to loom over the populace, and shiny. Parker asks Foster if there were “concerns about having a bank tower of shimmering gold,” and Foster clarifies that it’s bronze, which he spins as associated with “statuary.” An employee insinuates that it might have been a contentious choice. (“If you can sell bronze to Jamie Dimon … “)
At the Martha’s Vineyard compound, Ian Parker meets the architect by the swimming pool where “a young woman served champagne and fried calamari.” This isn’t Foster’s only vacation home, however. There’s another in “Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, one of France’s most expensive real-estate markets.” And Foster sometimes rents — like that villa in Lake Como — or travels farther afield, even “camping in Zambia, briefly in the company of the president of Zambia.” Foster’s actual, legal, registered address is “an 18-century château with a view of Lake Geneva” which he bought amid accusations of tax evasion. On top of his knighthood, acquired in 1990, he was appointed by Queen Elizabeth to a group called the “Order of Merit” in 1997 which includes David Hockney, David Attenborough, and Tom Stoppard.
Foster maintains control over the use of his name in marketing of his airports, skyscrapers, and museums, except for one project that he lost control of when Russia invaded Crimea. It’s a resort there that now has a bar called The Foster Club with the tagline, “The city falls asleep, Foster wakes up.” He seems “disappointed” when he learns of it from Parker.
Norman Foster in September at a building he’s fine being associated with: San Francisco’s TransAmerica tower, which reopened last year after a $250 million makeover.
Photo: Loren Elliott/Bloomberg/Getty Images
Foster’s firm had an in-house helicopter and private jet back in the 1990s when they only had 100 employees (a “challenge” to justify financially, an employee says). But he’s just really into planes, telling an interviewer that the “jumbo jet” is his favorite building. “Models of every aircraft type that Foster has ever flown” can be found on a cabinet in one of his offices, making “odd” optics or a sustainability meeting, Parker writes. Then there’s automatic shades that he’s incessantly toying with, to the annoyance of his wife, and an “autonomous lawnmower” that scares the geese.
Danish wunderkind Bjarke Ingels describes the way that Foster scaled up his business to the work of a film director who creates “massive blockbusters.” Sounds glowing, until Ingels compares Koolhaas to Kubrick and Foster to Spielberg. (But has he seen The Fabelmans?)
“It of course only comes from one place in Italy — one quarry in the whole planet,” a JPMorgan Chase executive tells Parker about the travertine around elevator bays, an example of how Foster plans his buildings to the millimeter and gets obsessive around materials. “And one guy has to match the pieces … There’s one Italian guy. He lays it all out in a big warehouse, piece by piece. I think he goes by one name, like Oprah.”
An ex-wife says Foster “thought that children should be seen and not heard.” Parker notices that he “expects to reach the end of his paragraphs, and talks over attempted interruptions with unmusical steeliness.” Even Michael Bloomberg finds him difficult enough to warn JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, “Look, this guy is going to be hard to work with.”