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Ever since his student years at Manchester University in the 1950s (a working-class boy, he paid his way through school with a variety of jobs, including a stint as a nightclub bouncer), Foster loved utilitarian buildings: barns, factories, windmills. He did measured drawings of them when other students were drawing buildings they had never seen: Greek temples, Palladian villas. Foster would learn from those too, but his immersion in common language and use translates into a feeling of rightness, which works as completely in small structures as in large. A fine example of the former is the entrances to the subway system he designed for Bilbao in northern Spain: hoods of glass, like segments of a nautilus shell ribbed with stainless steel that curve downward and carry the eye to the spaces underneath--by far the most elegant subway entrances since Hector Guimard's Art Nouveau designs for the Paris Metro a century ago.
He learned from other structures too. As a kid he built model aircraft, and as an adult he flies real ones, both fixed-wing and helicopters. He did his national service in the Royal Air Force and regards the time he spent working in a hangar as a big influence on his later designs. Way back in the genetic code of his buildings is a feeling for hangar-like lightness, strength and frugality of consumption that came out brilliantly in such projects as his 1981 design for the airport at Stansted in England. Earlier airports had massive concentrations of ductwork above their ceilings for air conditioning, lighting and electrical services; Foster rethought this completely and realized huge savings in structural mass and energy consumption could be made by shifting the utilities underground, leaving a floating roof and walls that could open to natural daylight. This changed architects' thinking about airport design worldwide, and every major airport built since--Hamburg, Stuttgart, Kuala Lumpur--has followed Foster's design insight.
He would reapply the lesson himself 11 years later in his $20 billion design for the world's largest airport, at Chek Lap Kok in Hong Kong--the last megastructure spawned by the floundering "tiger economies" of Asia. Foster envisaged it as a "horizontal cathedral," with its airy, Y-shaped passenger terminal under the great wing of its roof. It had teething troubles at first--there were cargo and passenger delays when it opened last July--but now, according to Wan Wai Lun, corporate affairs officer of the Hong Kong Airport Authority, "it's incredibly efficient and caters to the passengers' needs."