Norman Foster

Not one of his ten planets sits in a fire sign. Water takes five, air three and earth two, with four of the ten cardinal. The Sun and the Moon sit a degree and a half apart in Gemini, so he was born close to a new moon, and both signs are certain. The chart holds two T-squares. The record says Foster is the architect of the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank headquarters, the Reichstag dome and the Millau Viaduct, and that he worked in a town hall before studying architecture.

Both T-squares share the same base, Saturn against Neptune, with the Sun as the apex of one and the Moon of the other, so what looks like two figures is one opposition pressed on from two directions by the two lights. The Sun sits square Saturn at thirteen hundredths of a degree inside that, the tightest contact in the chart, and the reading is identity meeting a rule that will not move: self-doubt, delay, a difficult or absent authority, with the consolation that what gets built under it tends to last. For an architect the record credits with three named structures, that is one figure rather than two, and worth knowing before either is admired.

A rule that will not move is what an architect works against for a living. Gravity, a budget and a planning authority are all rules that do not move, and a building either stands or it does not. The reading was written about an internal relationship between a self and an authority, and the record describes an external one between a designer and a load, which is the distinction worth keeping even where the words line up this neatly. The consolation clause is the half with evidence: a bank, a parliament dome and a viaduct are all still standing.

The Moon sits square Neptune at under a fifth of a degree, need becoming fog: idealising the wrong people, and a longing for something that cannot be named, with its sign certain at twelve degrees of Gemini. Saturn lies at an awkward angle to Pluto at under half a degree, pressure against pressure, and the Sun in mild friction with that same Pluto at under three fifths, identity in a power struggle. Jupiter was the only retrograde planet. Saturn came back to its Pisces birth degree on 29 February 2024, at eighty eight, which makes it a third Saturn return rather than a first or a second. What the third one asks is not whether a thing was built but whether it was worth building, and a record of three named structures answers in concrete.