As well as his gifts as a designer, Norman Foster’s strength has lain in positioning his work within a certain accord with an ascendancy that is rarely questioned. If we call that outlook “technocratic”, we mean something more than that utopia of detailing once called “Hi-Tech”; it is a mindset at work throughout economic and political administration. Avoiding as “ideology” any ideal not operatively underwritten, it advances “pragmatically”; that is, only on such projects as those by which extant powers extend themselves.