Norman Foster

But nonetheless, there are those values.

I would say that common to any building anywhere is how do you anticipate the future?

So if I go back to an early building, which recently celebrated its half century, and that was the Willis Faber building in Ipswich, an insurance headquarters.

In the life of that building, that building had a high degree of flexibility.

And nobody in their wildest dreams anticipated that that flexibility would be used.

But in no time at all after it opened, it opened with typewriters.

And in no time, that building, and it was the only building in the insurance industry which was, as a headquarters, able to adapt.

It adapted to the digital revolution, to screens.

And the same was true of the Hong Kong Bank.

The Hong Kong Bank, which I also recently went to their 40th anniversary, as opposed to Willis Faber and their 50th anniversary.

So literally a few weeks ago, I was there at that celebration.

And the same thing there.

That building, quite radical.

at the time, and still in many ways radical, took the traditional central core of a tower, which contained the structure, the vertical circulation, the bathrooms, mechanical plant, took all that, fragmented it, put it at the sides of big open loft things.

Nobody anticipated that in the life of that building, the early life, there would be something known as a trading floor, where you need clear line of sight.

That wasn't a need in the late 1970s when the competition for that building, but it was able to absorb that.

So I think that the whole thing about the future is that by design you can, if I say that you create a building for the needs of today with an awareness of the past,

but to as far as you're able to anticipate the future, which is largely unknown.

But perhaps in terms of infrastructure, having

been backwards and forwards to Asia, and if I say China more specifically, over the last 30 years, I mean, the changes that I've seen, which interestingly I was communicating earlier this week to the Bloomberg event audience here and sharing that experience with them and showing them the China when I first went there.