With 87 summers behind you, putting on a giant exhibition of your life’s work at Paris’s prestigious Centre Pompidou might smack of the elegiac. But Baron Foster of Thames Bank, race-car collector, helicopter pilot, engineer of architectural derring-do, is in no mood to indulge the Grim Reaper. This, we are politely told as we enter, “is not a retrospective but rather a futurspective—an ongoing exploration for works that are inspired by the past, rooted in the present, but can adapt to the needs and desires of an optimistic future.”

A trove of drawings and sketches span six decades of Foster's work. Photo © Nigel Young/Foster + Partners