‘Like a doll’s house’: World’s skyscrapers come to Sydney in miniature

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Ninety-year-old Lord Norman Foster has been called the architect who changed the world, with his love of glass and steel skyscrapers such as the 180-metre London landmark, The Gherkin.

He has been awarded every architecture prize there is, but every design still starts with a pencil – a Pentel mechanical model .9 mm – and a drawing. And, later, a model: a kind of Lego for grown-ups.

100 scale model of the Gherkin, aka 30 St Mary Axe in London, at a new exhibition.

The most prosaic of things have been Foster’s inspiration, such as the curve of the handle bars of his old racing bike. “He loved the shape it made,” said Katy Harris, Foster’s communication manager and a senior partner who has worked with him for more than 40 years.

Since he founded Foster Associates, now known as Foster + Partners, in 1967, Foster has filled “well over” 1500 sketchbooks, Harris said.

And that initial drawing of the handlebars inspired the balustrades of the 1982 Hongkong and Shanghai Bank headquarters, in Hong Kong.

Foster’s drawing of the handle bars of his racing bike were the inspiration for the balustrades in the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank Headquarters.

This drawing and 30 scale models, including one of the bank, are included in an exhibition of Foster’s design and architecture opening this weekend in Sydney.

Called Civic Vision, it highlights the practice’s contribution to the urban environment and infrastructure, and its holistic approach to city design.

Showing in the practice’s newly completed in skyscraper in Sydney, Parkline Place above Gadigal Metro, it includes a model of the building visitors will be standing in.

Harris said, as well as drawings, the practice made scale models of every project, employing dozens of model makers.

“Having small models of buildings, 3D, things that you can see, look around, and touch, is the greater way of understanding how a building works. It is difficult when you go out in the city and see it from a distance,” she said.

“Having it as this scale, we find that children absolutely love coming to exhibitions. They’re fascinated. It is like a doll’s house.”

Muir Livingstone, a partner with Foster + Partners in Sydney, inspects a scale model of Stanstead Airport terminal building designed by the practice. It opened in 1991 and turned the old design of terminals upside down.

Muir Livingstone, a partner with the practice based in Sydney, said while most clients could read the plans, a scale model was “very, very powerful scale representation of what they were buying”.

On the scale model of the Gherkin, Livingstone pointed out that the darker glass on the building’s exterior tracked the atrium that wound around the building from top to bottom in a spiral illustrating the diagrid.

The exhibition also includes a model of the plans for Manchester United’s $4 billion New Trafford Stadium, which is part of a 260-acre regeneration project, the soon-to-open Zayed National Museum in Abu Dhabi, and Berlin’s Reichstag German parliament.

A model of Stansted Airport terminal reveals a light-filled design that is common these days, but was the first of its kind, turning conventional airport design upside down. Harris said, instead of putting the services in the roof, it put them under the floor.

For Maryanne Yosef, now finishing the last weeks of her masters of architecture at Western Sydney University, the exhibition is a chance to see how professionals work, compared with the much smaller scale models shown at university exhibitions.

The exhibition is employing a dozen young architecture students, including Yosef, and Tristan Ponomban, who is studying a masters of architecture at the University of Sydney.

Ponomban said Foster’s interest in drawing was similar to his own.

In 2023, the Pompidou Centre in Paris dedicated 2200 square metres to Foster’s work, including his sketchbooks and models, hosting a retrospective of more than 60 years of work by the architect, who cycles daily.

Curator Frédéric Migayrou said it was interesting how so many people who weren’t interested in architecture were interested in drawings of architecture. “People stayed a long, long time, studying the drawings,” he said.

Civic Vision will run from October 25 until December 21 at Sydney’s Parkline Place, opening to the public daily from 9am to 6pm.

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