Norman Foster has a worldwide reputation as one of the foremost architects of our time, but has never been the subject of a comprehensive retrospective in Japan – until now.

The exhibition is the first in the country to fully survey the design activities of Foster + Partners over the last half-century.

Tokyo’s Mori Art Museum will chart the company’s trajectory from a small firm founded with Foster’s wife in 1967, to the internationally celebrated practice that has completed more than 300 projects in 45 countries, and today employs more than 1,000 people.

A series of talks will accompany the exhibition, with contributions by David Nelson, Head of Design at Foster + Partners, and architects Namba Kazuhiko, Imamura Souhei, and Komiyama Yosuke.

The show aims to go beyond the headlines of recognizably sleek office buildings, and works such as Swiss Re (locally known as the Gherkin) in London, or the glass-domed Reichstag in Berlin.

The aim is to show Foster’s rise from a humble, working-class background in industrial Manchester to one of the starchitects of our time. He has been recognized with a Pritzker Prize, two Sterling Prizes, a knighthood in his native Britain, and a Life Peerage. (He remains Lord Foster but stopped attending the House of Lords some time ago and said in 2010 that he would give up his right to speak there, about the time that he became a resident of Switzerland).

The timeline of Foster’s career reflects the changing fortune of architecture, from a cottage industry for gentlemen, rarely working outside of their country of origin, to the big business it is today.

The exhibition includes his designs for Masdar, a carbon-neutral city to be built in Abu Dhabi, which marked a shift in thinking about climate change and the future of cities. His Reichstag in Berlin is highlighted, with its glass dome through which the citizens could walk above the heads of parliamentarians and gave the newly unified Germany an identifiable image of itself as a democratic nation. Even his Palace of Peace and Reconciliation, a preposterous pyramid of a building commissioned by the president of Kazakhstan, and unfortunately unveiled the same year as Sasha Baron Cohen’s first Borat movie, a mockumentary about the same Central Asian country, was seized as a representative example of how nations with poor records of democratic government can use architecture for image-building.

The exhibition tells his story by presenting 50 representative projects built by Foster + Partners, through models, videos, furniture, graphics, plans, and sketches. The three sections of the exhibition will cover his design philosophy of the practice, which was influenced by British engineer and philosopher R. Buckminster Fuller through an important collaboration over a long period; the design process at Foster + Partners; and its recent foray into utopian solutions for the buildings of the future. The latter section will include Masdar, but also the new Apple Campus 2, and lunar habitations made from lunar soil using a robot-operated 3D printer.

To see more iconic architectural works by Foster + Partners, click on the slideshow.

“Foster + Partners: Architecture, Urbanism, Innovation” runs through February 14 at Mori Art Museum, Tokyo.