Norman Foster, the man whose airport the world copied

Ask why modern terminals feel the way they do, and one building keeps coming up: Stansted. It is among the projects that made Norman Foster — born in Manchester in 1935, Yale-trained, founder of Foster + Partners in 1967 — the 21st Pritzker Prize laureate in 1999, alongside works like the British Museum and the Carré d'Art in Nîmes.

The same clarity lands on the desk: for Tecno he drew the Nomos table system, a structural frame worn on the outside, later followed by Cosmos. For Indian offices specified through La Mercanti, it is infrastructure at furniture scale — built by the man who rebuilt the terminal.