Norman Foster

“I describe the design process as like the tip of the iceberg. What you don't see is the long haul: all the endless auditing and things like that.”

“Google has already tested robot cars in San Francisco. If they can navigate San Francisco, they can probably manage just about anywhere.”

“Anything that reduces fuel consumption and cuts down on greenhouse gasses is good news.”

“I hope that any expansion of London will learn from the planning examples of some of its most desirable areas such as Chelsea, Notting Hill, Belgravia and Mayfair. All are characterised by high density and a generosity of green spaces. They are all pedestrian-friendly with shops, entertainment, restaurants and pubs within easy walking distance.”

“When the Great Fire of London destroyed most of the medieval city in 1666, Christopher Wren was invited to design a new one. Within days, he had drawn up an elegant grid of broad boulevards leading to majestic squares, but it came to nothing - the existing landowners wanted things as they had been.”

“Since Stonehenge, architects have always been at the cutting edge of technology. And you can't separate technology from the humanistic and spiritual content of a building.”

“A life-threatening illness or two certainly gives you an awareness of your own mortality. It heightens your sense of gratitude for things that previously, if you've not taken them for granted, you perhaps never appreciated how precious they were. That's almost a platitude, but one has to state the obvious.”

“Everything we design is a response to the specific climate and culture of a particular place.”

“In Britain, the idea one could go from blue-collar beginnings to the university was so far out, it was quite unthinkable. I took a variety of jobs to pay for tuition - from ice-cream salesman to night-club bouncer. Whatever earned the most money in the least time.”

“There's a snobbery at work in architecture. The subject is too often treated as a fine art, delicately wrapped in mumbo-jumbo. In reality, it's an all-embracing discipline taking in science, art, maths, engineering, climate, nature, politics, economics.”

“Joseph Bazalgette created a sewer system which he originally sized for London's needs of the time - he then doubled it to anticipate the future beyond. These are the qualities that I admire.”

“The only honourable work my parents knew was blue-collar. But while my father Robert ran a pawnbroker's shop, and my mother was a waitress, I moved into a middle-class world with a level of security they never knew.”