Sitting on a corner sofa in the Mandarin Oriental's Clipper Lounge, Lord Foster of Thames Bank tells two stories about instinct. The first concerns an old friend and mentor, the German graphic designer Otl Aicher, who was, among many things, chief designer for the 1972 Munich Olympics, creating its look and the first Olympic mascot, as well as the stick figures that we take for granted on public signs.
One morning, in the summer of 1991, Foster felt he hadn't seen Aicher for a while and needed to do so. Immediately. He rang him and suggested they have lunch that day. Aicher, surprised but pleased, said he had a friend staying but that they'd be delighted to see him.
Foster was in London. Aicher was in Germany.
'So I jump in the car,' Foster says. 'I drive to the airport, I take the Citation.' (For a second, the listener imagines some academic document clutched in his hand but, in this case, the Citation is one of Foster's private jets.) He flew to Leutkirch, in the Black Forest. 'We have a fantastic time. I stay the night, go for a cycle to a village with Otl and the other guy. Otl says to me, 'What do you notice about that church spire, Norman?' And I say, 'It's leaning.' And he says, 'Only you notice this, Norman - no one else sees it!''
One week later, 69-year-old Aicher was killed in a traffic accident. At the funeral, Foster saw the other man, who told him that, after he'd flown back to London, Aicher and his friend had sat wondering what the urgency had been about.
The other story involves his parents. Foster, an only child, was born in the English city of Manchester in 1935. His father was a pawnbroker, his mother a waitress. Many decades later, as is the way with age, he wanted to learn more about his deceased parents - particularly his mother, whom he thought may have been adopted. He arranged lunch with his cousin, Lionel, whose father (his mother's brother) was the only member of her generation still alive; he'd moved to Australia and was in a nursing home. Lionel planned to visit his father the following spring and suggested he and Foster go together.
'But I felt I had to go now. People said, 'Wait'. I said, 'I can't'. I couldn't even wait for the direct flight to Melbourne.'
