Renowned Architect Norman Foster to Receive Architecture Sarasota's Philip Hanson Hiss Award
Lord Norman Foster at "The Gherkin," a building he designed in London, England.
Image: Manolo Yllera
Norman Foster, a second-generation Sarasota School of Architecture luminary, is this year’s recipient of the second annual Philip Hanson Hiss Award.
The award celebrates renowned architects who have carried on the principles promoted by the Sarasota School of Architecture, which came to be thanks to a group of trailblazing architects including Victor Lundy and Paul Rudolph, as well as people like Hiss, who commissioned buildings and was vital to creating Sarasota's built environment. They designed homes with never-before-used materials that embraced the local climate. Spanning the early 1940s through the early '60s, the style is exemplified in original Sarasota School homes like the Umbrella House, and the Revere Quality House.
Norman Foster and Wendy Cheesman's Willis Faber and Dumas building.
Image: Courtesy Photo
Foster, who founded Foster + Partners, is one of the world's most well-known living architects and will give a lecture in Sarasota on March 22, with the award ceremony to be held the following day.
After beginning construction on Riverview High School, Sarasota High School and the Deering residence in Casey Key in 1958, Sarasota School forefather Rudolph was appointed chair of the School of Architecture at Yale University, where Foster was among his first students.
Throughout his career, Foster, 88, has extolled the principles of sustainable design, such as those promoted by the Sarasota School of Architecture. He gained fame in the early 1970s as the architect of the Willis Faber and Dumas headquarters in Ipswich, England, with his then-wife Wendy Cheesman, who passed away in 1989. The building was designed with an eco-friendly, open-floor plan considered radical at the time.
Hearst HQ in New York City
Image: Courtesy Photo
Foster went on to design more than 250 internationally renowned buildings, from Apple’s headquarters in Silicon Valley to Wembley Stadium to Hearst headquarters in New York City to the Beijing Airport. In 2004, he designed the tallest bridge in the world, the Millau Viaduct in southern France. In 1990, he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for his service to British architecture and she opened his terminal building for the award-winning London Stansted Airport. A book on his work was published earlier this year. To this day, Foster cites Rudolph's teachings as his greatest influence, and this March will mark a return to the sites of his mentor's work.
Foster will give a lecture at Art Ovation in downtown Sarasota on March 22, 2024, and will receive the second annual Hiss Award at an Architecture Sarasota fundraiser on March 23, 2024, at the Paul Rudolph and Ralph Twitchell–designed Revere Quality House. Click here for more details. To read about last year's Hiss Award recipient, click here.
