Norman Foster Sketchbooks 1975-2020

December 14, 2020

The Norman Foster Foundation presents the introductory volume of Norman Foster Sketchbooks 1975–2020, a new series reflecting Foster’s career from the 1970s until today, through his personal sketchbooks.

‘Norman Foster is a born draughtsman, specially gifted for sketching, and his drawings are particularly brilliant in their capacity for synthesis’. describes Jorge Sainz. As he puts it, ‘His graphism has certainly evolved through time, but it maintains that economy of means characteristic of people who, besides a good hand for drawing, have very clear ideas.’

Edited by Jorge Sainz, Norman Foster Sketchbooks 1975-2020 is the introductory title from a compilation of several volumes that will follow the work of Norman Foster in chronological decades, with two volumes published each year. This introductory volume of the Norman Foster Foundation’s Sketchbooks series presents more than 546 drawings.

‘So it is that a whole personality is captured in the sketchbooks that this book presents. A book which, for lovers of drawing, will be yet another excuse to keep up their inquisitive scrutiny of those pieces of paper that have always reflected the creative subtleties of architectural genius, of scintilla divinitatis.’ – Jorge Sainz

‘I am truly grateful to Jorge Sainz for his scholarly insights and the immense task of wading through so many images and then with a selective eye, and at times humour, doing what, for me, would have been impossible, namely to choose and reject.’ – Norman Foster