Norman Foster: A Life in Architecture - Hardcover

Sudjic explans how Foster helped transform his profession. When he started out, it was largely a gentlemanly, small-scale business, a sort of cottage industry with a strong emphasis on the handicraft of models and drawings. Projects outside an architect's country were the exception. Today, Foster's practice employs well over 1,000 people. The book tells this story clearly and it makes a good introduction to Foster (Rowan Moore THE OBSERVER)

Deyan Sudjic's discursive biography offers a portrait of a searcher, a man always exploring the limits of architecture, of whom one client pays the ultimate compliment: Foster "asked the right questions". (Leo Hollis SUNDAY TELEGRAPH)

It is an extraordinary story of a truly self-made man who seems a kickback to the great Victorians, the engineers and industrialists who made the Manchester he came from and conquered the world with their machines (Edwin Heathcote FINANCIAL TIMES)

Deyan Sudjic has delivered meticulously researched and pyschologically resonant insights into the conflicting forces of aspiration and outsider status that propelled Foster towards his breakthrough building, the amenities block for the Fred Olsen Line in Milwall in 1969....Sudjic is particularly good at delineating Foster's astonishing ability to get clients to revise their expectations so that he could develop truly radical architecture (Jay Merrick THE INDEPENDENT)

The success of the book comes from its insights into the young Foster's life (Alice Wyllie THE SCOTSMAN)

Deyan Sudjic has traced Foster's career since he mounted the now legendary Fosters Rogers Stirling Exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1986...This book is a story about power that charts Foster's journey (Ed Hollis DAILY TELEGRAPH)