Full of excitement, a boy waits every day for the train to pass a few meters from his house, causing a jolt that will vibrate his body and the ground under his feet. The scene, before which a Freudo-Lacanian psychoanalyst would rub his hands, can explain a lot about the adulthood of its protagonist: in the forties of the last century, in an English industrial neighborhood, that child was Norman Foster (Manchester, 87 years). “I grew up next to the railway tracks and when the express arrived, they shook even the windows,” recalls the British architect. “I could spend hours waiting for that train to appear, it was very exciting.”
Eight decades later, when he gives this interview, Foster is in Bilbao with Motion. Cars, Art, Architecturethe exhibition that will be in the Guggenheim museum until September 18, of which he is the curator, together with Manuel Cirauqui and Lekha Hileman Waitoller, and which relates various historical vehicles with architectural designs and works of art: a sculpture by Boccioni or a mobile by Calder. Eleven cars are part of Foster’s private collection, for example the Voisin that belonged to Le Corbusier or a Jaguar E Type from 1961. Almost all the pieces make more or less explicit reference to the idea of movement, something with which the architect he began to obsess as a result of those childish adrenaline rushes caused by the passage of the train. An obsession that would still be amplified thanks to the images of Eaglethe comics magazine that marked several generations of teenagers in their country with the promise of a future made of aerodynamic shapes and supersonic speed.
![The Lancia Stratos Zero (1970) by Marcello Gandini for Bertone.](https://imagenes.elpais.com/resizer/C7AcJuMFd2MRcy92-VS9yORyfXA=/414x0/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/prisa/7OBEKGCOAZBT7J26BS6MEX32VI.jpg)
“Then I fantasized about that utopia that did not become real, but now, in this exhibition, the timeless beauty of historic cars can be appreciated,” he explains, which is reminiscent of the well-known boutade from the futurist poet Marinetti: a racing car is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace. Foster picks up the glove phlegmatically: “Marinetti was exaggerating, as Roland Barthes did when he said that the Citroën DS [presente en la exposición] it was the modern equivalent of the Gothic cathedral. But that was his way of highlighting the cultural and aesthetic dimension of the car.”
In the exhibition there are precursor cars, utility cars, sports cars and even wonders of the bodywork of the thirties, or the seventies. A passionate vision at a time when more than one observer predicts the disappearance of the automobile due to social and environmental causes. Foster argues it this way: “In a way, we go back to the transition of the 20th century, when cars rid cities of pollution and diseases related to the use of horses. We are once again on the verge of a new era, with current phenomena such as mobility through on-demand services; or future ones, like autonomous vehicles moving side by side like train cars, which will eliminate human error.” Would it be frustrating for amateur drivers? “That’s right, but the same thing happened to those who grew up in a world where people moved around on horseback. There was a shared energy between the human and the other living being, and when they were told that the horse was going to be mechanized, the scenario must also have seemed very boring.
![A Bentley R-Type Continental (1953).](https://imagenes.elpais.com/resizer/p4Hrn-I5k-vAaPGrTKc7i6NZA5o=/414x0/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/prisa/ILLHPBM345EKDNIU3XXIA4NBKY.jpg)
That passion for vehicles has found in the Guggenheim a generous channeling channel, but we must not forget that his own architectural practice constantly returns to the ambition of suggesting movement. “Many of my works deal with the dynamics of movement and the change of spaces,” he concedes. “That’s how it was in the Reichstag in Berlin (1993), where the spiral that surrounds the dome is what leads the visitor, something that also happens in the ramp of the Bloomberg headquarters in London. It’s about celebrating the flow of people, and that they can intuitively find their way.”
The spiral appears, almost as a feature of style, at least in another of his emblematic buildings, the London Town Hall in the district of Southwark (2002). As for the idea that architecture serves to guide its users, it has rarely been developed as clearly as in the Bilbao metro (1995), which remains one of his masterpieces thanks to its grandiose formal refinement and relentless sense of utility. At the same time, the most modest and the most ambitious. “I did that project with designer Otl Aicher, with two very small teams,” he recalls. “We looked for spaces that could lead you intuitively. And we also wanted to celebrate the excavation of the tunnels itself, that force of nature that is so intrinsically beautiful that it did not need to be decorated. We manage to do a quality project, because quality is a mental attitude: it is not what you spend, but how wisely you do it. In return, I must say that we invested a lot of time in ensuring that if someone painted graffiti on the cement it could be easily cleaned, which in the end proved unnecessary because to date no one has attacked it or tried to disfigure it with graffiti.”
![The Delahaye 165 car (1939).](https://imagenes.elpais.com/resizer/lE76TKeYOGd3paqrgd1xi3DGlpY=/414x0/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/prisa/UNBKSFDMG5E2XISZA57DKNFPM4.jpg)
In fact, the city immediately embraced that infrastructure with a combination of pride and attachment —fosterito It is the unofficial name that every Bilbaoan uses to refer to their subway entrances—which has not even spared the great local icon of contemporary architecture, Frank Gehry’s own Guggenheim. It is tempting to think of the Biscayan capital as the scene of a war between two star architects, a rivalry that, however, reality denies: beyond this symbolic collaboration, both have cooperated on projects such as the buildings in the area of the Battersea power station, in London, Foster remembers. “Frank and I have worked together on more than one occasion, and we have met again for this exhibition. As a tribute to him, we have not added architectural interventions so that his spaces can be freely enjoyed”.
But Bilbao is also the city where his studio, Foster + Partners, is developing one of its two major museum projects in our country, the expansion of the Museum of Fine Arts —the other is the reform of the Salón de Reinos del Retiro in Madrid—, which it hopes to finish in mid-2024. Far from unanimous approval that spawned the subway, this other design has been described by some critical (and particularly imaginative) voices as a UFO landing on the original building. Foster offers a very different interpretation: “It’s about recycling and expanding the building rather than creating an entirely new one. We intend to restore its historical importance and respect subsequent additions with minimal disruption. The visitor will be aware of the different layers of history, and at the same time, they will obtain a space that does not exist in the city now”.
![Norman Foster at the exhibition 'Motion. Cars, Art, Architecture' at the Guggenheim Museum.](https://imagenes.elpais.com/resizer/pFDE3kYGJyUC16qJwjOTHKtTjvw=/414x0/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/prisa/EZLLGQCILNAFVK6PNO4UF5V5XA.jpg)
Beyond the potential iconic value of his interventions, for him the essential thing has always been the relationship with the city. He sees himself more as an urban planner than an architect. “The combination of buildings, that structure that is the urban glue, is more important than the individual buildings,” he says. “And my goal is to promote awareness that design affects the quality of our lives. When we linked the two banks of the Thames with the Millennium Bridge, or when we built the shade pavilion in the Vieux Port of Marseille, the quality of life of the inhabitants and visitors of those cities increased. More than any tower we’ve ever designed. Projects like these allow us to contribute something to the community.”
It is an unexpected social reference in an architect who is usually perceived as a paradigm of genius, of the author. At this point, the conversation turns to the spring (1943), Ayn Rand’s novel starring a visionary architect who was an ode to individualism, in line with the author’s ultraliberal thinking. Foster moves away from this cliché and prefers to highlight the work of the professionals in her studio, together with whom she materializes each project. “That popular conception of the architect as a loner with blinding flashes of inspiration is totally false”, she reasons, and here too she cannot avoid the kinetic parallelism: “The creative process is not an illumination, but a long-distance race. It’s the same as in the Tour de France. The winner has benefited from the work of the platoon, even if it is only he who gets the jersey yellow”.
Realization: Pedro Canicoba.
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