Norman Foster grew up in working-class Manchester, paid his own way through the Manchester School of Architecture, and won a fellowship to Yale, where he met Richard Rogers. The two returned to found Team 4 with Su Brumwell and Wendy Cheesman; when it dissolved, Foster and Cheesman continued as Foster Associates. The early work argued a single case with unusual clarity — that a building should be an engineered, serviced, light-weight enclosure that could be assembled fast and changed later — and the Willis Faber headquarters at Ipswich and the Sainsbury Centre at Norwich made that case decisively in the 1970s. The practice grew into one of the largest in the world, delivering the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank, the Reichstag dome, Stansted, and Hong Kong's airport. He received the Pritzker Prize in 1999.
