The Glass House commemorated its 10th year as a site of the National Trust for Historic Preservation with this intimate conversation and dinner benefiting preservation at the site.

Norman Foster is the founder and executive chairman of Foster + Partners, a global studio for architecture, urbanism and design, rooted in sustainability. He was born in Manchester, and after graduating from Manchester University School of Architecture and City Planning in 1961 he won a Henry Fellowship to Yale University, where he was a fellow of Jonathan Edwards College and gained a Master’s Degree in Architecture. In 1967, he established Foster + Partners in London, and over five decades the practice has been responsible for a strikingly wide range of work, from urban master plans, public infrastructure, airports, civic and cultural buildings, offices and workplaces to private houses and furniture design. Major projects include Beijing Airport, Millau Viaduct in France, 30 St Mary Axe (also known as the Gherkin) and the Great Court at the British Museum in London, the Hearst Headquarters tower in New York, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Current projects include the Apple Park in California, Bloomberg’s European Headquarters in London, and the Norton Museum of Art in Florida. He is president of the Norman Foster Foundation, based in Madrid with a global reach, promoting interdisciplinary thinking and research to help new generations of architects, designers and urbanists anticipate the future. He became the 21st Pritzker Architecture Prize Laureate in 1999 and was awarded the Praemium Imperiale Award for Architecture in Tokyo in 2002. In 2009, he became the 29th laureate of the prestigious Prince of Asturias award for the Arts and was awarded the Knight Commander’s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. In 1990, he was granted a Knighthood in the Queen’s Birthday Honours, appointed by the Queen to the Order of Merit in 1997 and in 1999 was honoured with a Life Peerage in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List, as Lord Foster of Thames Bank.

Robert A.M. Stern is an architect, teacher, writer, and the former Dean of the Yale School of Architecture. Stern first visited Philip Johnson’s Glass House as a Yale Architecture student in 1961, and soon began a long and enduring professional friendship with Johnson. After graduating with his Master of Architecture degree in 1965, at Johnson’s suggestion (and with his oversight) Stern began his career developing programs for the Architectural League of New York as the League’s first J. Clawson Mills Fellow. In 1985, Stern recorded a series of interviews with Johnson that were edited and published in 2008 as The Philip Johnson Tapes: Interviews by Robert A.M. Stern. Johnson was a featured guest in Stern’s “Pride of Place: Building the American Dream,” an eight-part, eight-hour documentary television series that first aired on the Public Broadcasting System in 1986. Stern was the 2011 Driehaus Prize laureate and in 2008 received the tenth Vincent Scully Prize from the National Building Museum. In 2007, he received both the Athena Award from the Congress for the New Urbanism and the Board of Directors’ Honor from the Institute of Classical Architecture and Classical America. Before returning to Yale in 1998, Stern was Professor of Architecture and Director of the Historic Preservation Program at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation at Columbia University. He served from 1984 to 1988 as the first director of Columbia’s Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture. Stern has lectured extensively in the United States and abroad on both historical and contemporary topics in architecture. As founder and Senior Partner of the 260-person New York-based Robert A.M. Stern Architects, Stern directs the design of each of the firm’s projects.