Norman Foster, the only designer here with a river in his name

Titles usually name places; his names a river. When Norman Foster received a life peerage in 1999 he became Lord Foster of Thames Bank — a fitting address for the Manchester-born architect, class of 1961, who took a Henry Fellowship to Yale, founded his practice in 1967 and collected the Pritzker Prize, the RIBA Royal Gold Medal and the AIA Gold Medal along the way.

His longest-running industrial conversation is with Tecno: the Nomos table — an exposed structural frame carrying desks and meeting tables like a piece of engineering — followed decades later by Cosmos. Both sit in the La Mercanti catalogue; the river, presumably, stayed in London.