Manchester United are all set to construct a new stadium after the club confirmed plans on Tuesday (Mar 11) in a social media announcement. Home of Man Utd for more than a century, Old Trafford will be replaced by a new state-of-the-art arena which will be constructed adjacent to the existing one. The new construction will be carried under supervision of legendary English architect Norman Foster, renowned for his British modernist architecture.

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Who is Norman Foster?

Born on 1 June 1935, Foster attended the University of Manchester (1956–61) in England and Yale University (1961–62) in New Haven, Connecticut. He would then step into the architect business and started his firm Foster Associates (later Foster + Partners) in 1967. Before that, he would work in partnership with Richard and Su Rogers and his wife, Wendy Foster, in a firm called Team 4.

Foster’s first buildings to receive international acclaim were the Sainsbury Centre for the Visual Arts (1978) in Norwich, England, a vast airy glass-and-metal-paneled shed, and the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC) headquarters (1986) in Hong Kong.

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Foster, a veteran of the Royal Air Force (1953–55) and an avid pilot, also applied his preference for open plans and natural lighting to airports, such as Stansted (1991) outside London and Chek Lap Kok (1998).

Some of Foster’s impressive football designs include the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, where he laid the concept for the Lusail Stadium, the event’s centerpiece for the final.

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Foster is also a recipient of numerous awards for his work—including the Pritzker Prize (1999), the Japan Art Association’s Praemium Imperiale prize for architecture (2002) and the Aga Khan Award (2007).

So with new designs unveiled, the excitement has already started to build amongst the Manchester United fans. The new stadium will also become UK’s biggest single sporting arena boosting a capacity of more than 100,000 fans and state-of-the-art facilities.