Norman Foster Institute Madrid, NFF Spain architecture news, Academic programme On Sustainable Cities

Norman Foster Institute Madrid News

15 June 2023

Launch Of The Norman Foster Institute To Improve The Quality Of Life In Cities Worldwide

Norman Foster, President of the Norman Foster Foundation, with students

All images © Pablo Gómez-Ogando / Norman Foster Institute

• The Norman Foster Foundation has launched The Norman Foster Institute which is accepting applications for its first academic programme On Sustainable Cities, starting in Madrid in January, 2024.

• The Institute has assembled an international multidisciplinary team of professors, practitioners, and civil leaders led by Co-Directors Norman Foster and Kent Larson.

• The inaugural course On Sustainable Cities will be a 36-week programme in three stages — Foundations, Transformations and Interventions —with time divided between classrooms, cities and studios.

Essential Homes Research Project – Venice Architecture Biennale 2023

Each year, scholars will work in three pilot cities that they will visit to engage directly with their planners and managers. They will use the most up-to-date digital tools in the quest to improve a sustainable quality of life. Towards the end of the year, the scholars will present their findings to the city administration and there will be an emphasis on advocacy and presentation skills. On the basis that historically cities learn from each other, scholars will explore the relevance of their conclusions in the wider context of global cities.

Since the launch of the Norman Foster Foundation in 2017, its mission has been to promote interdisciplinary thinking and research to help new generations to anticipate the future.

Norman Foster said: “The future of our society is the future of our cities— they are our greatest invention. This institute, in a time of climate change, is addressed to those who wish, through practice or education, to im- prove the quality of life in cities worldwide. In that spirit, the course will combine practical on-site experience with academic input from the Foundation’s network of international experts. These range from university professors to property developers.

It will start with tools and skills that can be used to address wide ranging issues of cities. For instance, leadership, advocacy, communication, presentation, diagramming, mapping, and the understanding and interpretation of data. These could be applicable to cities from Asia, the Middle East, South and North America to Africa and Europe, as well as informal settlements and suburbia.

The curriculum then narrows down to three pilot cities that scholars will visit to engage directly with their planners and managers. For study purposes, neighbourhoods have been selected in each city to raise an awareness of the issues that affect the living standards for those who live or visit there.

Typical issues are carbon footprints, density, mix of uses, equality and affordability, walkability, place making, townscape and landscape, public and private transport, politics and economics, energy, recycling, consultation, interest groups and decision making.

Several of these many issues will be distilled to create a small number of well-defined project assignments which will be addressed by the scholars working on site and in the studio, either in teams or individually. In this multidisciplinary approach, the scholars would use the most up-to-date digital tools in the quest to improve a sustainable quality of life.

In this first cycle of the course the pilot cities will be European, although the methodical approach will be adaptable to other kinds of cities.

Towards the end of the year the scholars will present their findings to the city administration and there will be an emphasis on advocacy and presentation skills. The lessons from these real-life experiences will be documented by film and other media, culminating in a public event. On the basis that historically cities learn from each other, it will be important for the scholars to explore the relevance of their conclusions in the wider context of global cities.

The course is like an hourglass; starting wide in its scope, then narrowing down to focus on tangible issues that can be quantified and addressed, and finally, opening up to a wider debate.”

Norman Foster Foundation
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www.normanfosterfoundation.org

The Norman Foster Institute has assembled an integrative team of professionals from different continents to provide a global vision and a broad spectrum of expertise for those seeking a holistic approach to the future design and manage- ment of cities. Norman Foster, President of the Norman Foster Foundation, and Kent Larson, Head of the City Science group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab, Co-Directors of the On Sustainable Cities Programme, will lead a body of distinguished global experts drawn from diverse backgrounds and disciplines.

The Academic Council will include:
Norman Foster, NFI Co-Director, Founder and Executive Chairman, Foster + Part- ners, London, United Kingdom; President, the Norman Foster Foundation, Madrid, Spain; Advocate to the United Na- tions Forum of Mayors; Edgar Pieterse, NFI Provost, Director, African Centre for Cities; Professor in Urban Innovation, University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa. Dava J. Newman, NFI Honorary Dean, Director, MIT Media Lab, Massa- chusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA, United States; Kent Larson, NFI Co-Director, Director, City Science Research Group, MIT Media Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA, United States; Alejandro Aravena, Executive Director, ELEMENTAL, Santiago, Chile; ELEMENTAL Copec Chair, Universidad Católica de Chile, San- tiago, Chile. Deborah Berke, Dean, School of Architecture, Yale University, New Haven, CT, United States; Vishaan Chakrabarti, Founder and Creative Director, Practice for Architecture and Urbanism (PAU), New York, NY, United States; Beatriz Corredor, Former Ministry of Housing, Non-executive Director, Red Eléctrica, Madrid, Spain; Óscar Fanjul, Former Founder, Chairman and CEO, Repsol, Madrid, Spain; Vice Chairman, Ferrovial, Madrid, Spain; Elena Foster, Vice President, the Norman Foster Foundation; CEO and Founder, Ivorypress, Madrid, Spain; Ian Golding, Director, Oxford Martin Research Programme, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom; Francis Kéré, Founder and Principal, Kéré Architecture and Kéré Foundation, Berlin, Germany.

The Academic Chairs will include:
Joseph G. Allen, Director, Healthy Buildings Program, T. H. Chan School of Public Health, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, United States; Luis M.A. Bettencourt, Inaugural Director, Mansueto Institute for Urban Innovation, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, United States; Frédérick Bordry, CERN Honorary Member, Special Advisor to the CERN DG and Former CERN Director for Accelerators and Technology, Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire (CERN), Geneva, Switzerland; Laila Iskandar, Co-Founder, CID CONSULTING, Former Minister of State in the Government of Egypt, Egypt; Mitchell Joachim, Co-founder of Terreform ONE, Associate Professor of Practice, New York University (NYU), New York, NY, United States; Sarah Kenderdine, Professor of Digital Museology, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland; Peter B. de Menocal, President and Director, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), Falmouth, MA, United States; Gil Penalosa, Founder and Chair, 8 80 Cities, Toronto, ON, Canada; Stuart Smith, Director, Arup, Berlin, Germany; Board Member, Holcim Foundation, Zurich, Switzerland; Tim Stonor, Managing Director of Space Syntax, London, United Kingdom; Hans Ulrich Obrist, Artistic Director, Serpentine Galleries, London, United Kingdom; Maria Vassilakou, Founder, Vienna Solutions; Former Vice Mayor, Vienna, Austria. The full list of academic faculty and team will be announced later this year.

Norman Foster Foundation

The Norman Foster Foundation promotes interdisciplinary thinking and research to help new generations anticipate the future. The first mission of the Norman Foster Foundation is to make visible the centrality of architecture, infrastructure, and urbanism for the betterment of society.

To this end, the second mission is to encourage new thinking and research across traditional boundaries in order to help younger generations anticipate the challenges of future change. In particular, the foundation speaks to those professionals who are concerned with the environment: architects, engineers, designers, urbanists, civic leaders, planners, and artists. This is at the heart of the Foundation’s holistic approach to design and is ever more relevant as populations shift to cities. With the implications of climate change, robotics and artificial intelligence, sustainable design is not about fashion but about survival.

The Foundation holds the Norman Foster Archive and Library, which provide a window into the larger narrative and history of our built environment through the work of Norman Foster. This is complemented and supported by drawings and models from other significant architects such as Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Charles and Ray Eames, Buckminster Fuller, Richard Rogers, Zaha Hadid and Tadao Ando.

Through its research initiatives and programmes, the Norman Foster Foundation encourages the transfer of advanced knowledge in a wide range of design fields. The Foundation’s educational initiatives are structured around research, workshops, fellowships and forums, built around the Foundation’s core objectives.

The Norman Foster Foundation operates from the United Kingdom, the United States and Spain with its headquarters based in Madrid.
Visit www.normanfosterfoundation.org for more information or follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Vimeo.

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