Norman Foster (b. 1935)
Filed under the name Norman · February 11, 2026
Norman Foster designs landmark buildings all over the world that somehow manage to be both structurally innovative and genuinely beautiful, which is the architecture version of writing a joke that's technically clever and also actually funny — way harder to pull off than either one alone. I write code for a living, so I have a real appreciation for someone whose entire discipline is making something incredibly complex underneath look effortless and light-filled on the surface, because that's basically the goal of good software too, minus the part where if you mess it up, a building falls down instead of an app just crashing. My dad, an engineer himself, would probably love Foster's whole 'engineering as elegance' philosophy way more than he loves my career choice of 'jokes and backend databases.' Buildings you can actually see from space, still standing, still admired decades later — that's a kind of permanence I genuinely envy from inside an industry where my code gets deprecated every eighteen months.