This Volume V · 1996–2000 of the Norman Foster Sketchbooks series closes the twentieth century, covering the five-year period of 1996–2000. The period was marked by two important milestones, both in 1999: the official opening of the new Reichstag in Berlin and Norman Foster winning the Pritzker Prize. The awarding ceremony for the latter event also took place in Berlin, in two architectural masterworks: Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s Altes Museum and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Neue Nationalgalerie (New National Gallery). The end of the period was flagged by the turn of the millennium, the year 2000, with two significant projects for London: a tower which was not built and a bridge that was, between the City and the new Tate Modern.

As in the earlier volumes, the structure is thematic, with the usual first part on architecture, ordered by individual projects and an additional section devoted to further schemes scarcely developed in the sketchbooks. The number of projects illustrated in this case is greater than in the previous volumes, so the second part is reduced to a single section on furniture and objects, plus the usual miscellany at the end.

The Norman Foster Sketchbooks series is a collection of Foster’s career drawings from the 1970s to the present day, through his personal sketchbooks. It is a compilation of several volumes that follows the work of Norman Foster in chronological sequence.