How Norman Foster made the classic architect studio go global

Celebrated founder has structured his practice in unusual ways to promote creativity 

John Gapper

Lord Norman Foster sits in the open-plan main studio of Foster + Partners by the River Thames at Battersea, recalling the way architects once worked. “It’s probably easier to explain with a drawing,” he says, leaning forward to his notebook to sketch in pencil how rolls of paper were fed to desks before personal computers. 

Much has changed since Foster founded his own architectural practice in 1967 with his late wife Wendy. Foster + Partners has embraced the computer age and is a great deal bigger and more global. It has 1,300 architects (including trainees) among 2,400 employees, and its recent projects range from JPMorgan’s skyscraper on Park Avenue in New York to a new art gallery in Shanghai.

“It started in a bedsit in Hampstead. 16b Hampstead Hill Gardens, first floor,” Foster recalls precisely of Team 4, the firm he co-founded with the late Lord Richard Rogers and others in 1963 before breaking away. Foster + Partners is the largest UK architectural firm and one of the world’s most prestigious, although smaller than global corporate practices such as Gensler and Arcadis.

The Foster practice was driven to expand after finding in the early 1990s that it was overdependent on the UK, which was in a property recession. Having started to work internationally with the Hong Kong head office of HSBC, by 2025 93 per cent of its revenues came from outside the UK. Projects in the Middle East contributed by far the most of any region.

Foster remains executive chair and the firm’s guiding spirit. He is 91 but still energetic and spry, with no intention of retiring although succession is clearly a consideration.

He is confident his practice will endure after he is gone. “Of course there will be differences, but succession has been long planned. There’s an extraordinary depth of talent. It’s like a chamber orchestra. It doesn’t need me as the conductor.”

One of his legacies will be the unusual way Foster + Partners works. The firm is an outlier among architectural practices and other professional services firms in operating globally and on a large range of projects without dividing itself by regions or specialisms. It is arranged in seven studios that work in parallel: the seventh was created this year.

“Anybody can do anything, anywhere, as long as they don’t compete,” Foster summarises. The studios, initially comprising about 60 people each, were formed in 2004 to maintain the creativity of small teams within a large organisation. They also reflect Foster’s nature. “I would go mad having to work just in one place [or] if I had to work on towers, towers, towers . . . that’s ritualistic and bureaucratic and the opposite of what makes us all tick.”

This makes Foster + Partners an interesting place to practise, but it also involves complexity. The studios have their own leadership and pitch individually for new business, although some clients (such as the late Steve Jobs for Apple’s headquarters in California) come directly to Foster. Some projects end up being worked on as joint ventures between studios.

Stuart Latham, managing partner, says any internal tension over who does what is resolved by discussion, although “there is a danger of tripping over ourselves on occasion and sometimes we are not as elegant as we might be”. As the firm has grown, its studios, numbered one to seven, have expanded in size to between 150 and 300 people each.

The closest to an oversight body is a firm-wide design board, chaired by Foster, including full-time members along with the studio heads. But its purpose is architectural rather than managerial. Foster compares its methods to the “jury” tradition of reviews in architectural schools. “You show your work and explain it, and then people start throwing rocks,” says Latham.

Foster has always liked shaking things up. He recalls insisting to the dean of the Yale School of Art and Architecture, where he studied in the early 1960s, that he needed help to design a tower: “I said, ‘I don’t know about tall buildings, I need an engineer.’” Foster + Partners now employs a range of design specialists, including about 370 structural and environmental engineers.

Foster hops around, attaching himself to a variety of projects being worked on by the different studios, currently including an Alpine village regeneration and a planned tower for JPMorgan in London. “The studio system and how you keep it alive is a learning curve . . . like most architects, I’ve had no business training. I’ve learnt it to a degree through trial and error.”

The firm thrives on internal challenge, Foster says. “The organisation is hierarchical in terms of ownership but creatively, it’s a horizontal line. Anybody can come as an intern and say, ‘I think there’s a better idea.’” But his dominance is evident, both in his personal authority and partnership share: Foster and his family hold 9 per cent of the equity, with another third split among 240 partners.

Foster + Partners has been in and out of private equity hands: the UK firm 3i once held a 40 per cent stake but the Foster partners bought this back in 2014.

 Hennick & Co, a Canadian family investment firm, holds a majority stake, which it took in 2021. “It’s essentially a family . . . it has not changed the nature of the practice,” he says of Hennick.

But Hennick’s backing enables Foster + Partners to invest in expansion, including new offices and technology. The firm has been growing briskly: revenue in the year to April 30 2025 reached £571mn from £369mn the previous year and it has recently opened offices in Seoul and Miami. It has also worked on several big projects in the Middle East, including the King Salman international airport in Riyadh.

Foster has used his relationship adroitly with Hennick to reinforce his will. The investor supported him when he wanted to grow further by adding a seventh studio. To his mind, it offered “more succession, more opportunity. I predict, in no time at all, there’ll be an eighth studio”.

Change means upheaval: it has appointed a new studio head and moved the head of another one to a new role, leading research and innovation. Foster says he encountered “entrenched views” among some partners against adding a studio but found “a kindred voice [at] Hennick saying, ‘You’re absolutely right, Norman, we’ve got to work at this together.’”

Growth also helps to keep the firm youthful, one of Foster’s obsessions. “He loves to see a young office. I think he’d be happy if he was the only person here over 40,” Latham observes. Some longer-serving partners have retired and the average age of employees is now 34. About half of its architects are fully qualified, with the rest in the long period of practical training the profession requires.

The founder remains in motion. He is resident in Switzerland but spends a week a month in London and another in Madrid, where he presides over his own foundation. He also crosses the world to the firm’s offices and projects: his last trip took in Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Beijing, Shanghai and Baku. Foster is “more active than he has been in ages . . . he is here and he keeps the rest of us on our toes,” Latham says. As he approaches his firm’s 60th anniversary, there is no sign of him letting go.