Norman Foster

It's a restaurant, it's a cinema, it's a hotel, and all the while it's moving from one place to the other.

And also to start to think about the miracle

I mean, there's still an extraordinary magic that these machines which are weighing tons can somehow by lumbering along the runway, suddenly levitate and then transport us vast distances.

And I think there are also a lot of lessons in terms of the built world.

In other words, how can we use harness technology to improve the quality of life?

Literally this morning, I was sitting around a table with a group of us as architects here in the foundation on a project alongside the individual who will be going to build that building.

And we're saying, well, the next stage is to do this, we really have to have the environmental engineer.

We have to have this structural engineer.

And that will be the next meeting.

So that was the first meeting.

Now we were able to go so far, but only so far.

And we recognize the need to have those other skills on board.

Now, we could have, and it would have been absolutely traditional, we could have just collectively designed that building and then just passed it on.

but there would be so many lost opportunities.

Because if you think of a building as an integration of systems, I mean, if I tried to bring this back to the world of automotive design, and I found myself trying to communicate that, this principle to a group of automotive engineers, not just the engineers, but those who are making the cars.

And the example that I took was

A point in time in the 1930s when pretty well all of the cars, any production car, followed a certain pattern.

It was a chassis and then a body on top of that, which was a shell to enclose and protect the occupants from the rain, the elements from nature.

And then at one point,

The car emerged, it was the Chrysler Airflow, and the body became not just the shell, it became an integral part of the structure.