Background
He was born in 1944 in Farnham, Surrey, son of artists Captain Sir Roger de Grey and Flavia Hatt Irwin.
He was born in 1944 in Farnham, Surrey, son of artists Captain Sir Roger de Grey and Flavia Hatt Irwin.
He studied architecture at Cambridge University under Sir Leslie Martin.
Amanda Lucy Annan in 1977 and has two children. On leaving Cambridge in 1969, he worked for the London Borough of Merton on one of the first middle schools in the United Kingdom. He became a registered architect in 1969 and a chartered architect in 1993.
He joined Foster Associates in 1973, continuing his work in education on the Palmerston Special School in Liverpool.
He then worked on the Hammersmith Centre before, in 1979, setting up Foster Associates" office in Hong Kong to build the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank. In 1981 he returned to London to become the director in charge of Stansted Airport, which he saw through to completion in 1991.
During this period, he also worked on the unbuilt British Broadcasting Corporation Radio Centre and was responsible for the Sackler Galleries at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. He is responsible for a number of projects in the United States of America including the masterplan and first phase of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Winspear Opera House in Dallas, Avery Fisher Hall at New York"s Lincoln Center and the competition winning scheme for the National Portrait Gallery courtyard at the Smithsonian, Washington District of Columbia. In May 2007, Foster + Partners restructured with external investor 3i and the new executive board included Lord Foster as Chairman, Mouzhan Majidi as Chief Executive, and original shareholders Spencer de Grey and David Nelson as Heads of Design.
He lectures widely, is an architectural advisor for the Royal Botanical Gardens in Kew, chairman of the Building Centre Trust and was a visiting lecturer at the Royal College of Art"s Curating Contemporary Art course.
He is chairman of the Cambridge University School of Architecture Advisory Board, and was elected Visiting Professor of Architecture from January 2010 until September 2011. He was elected a Royal Academician in December 2008.