Birkin Haward was the first to collaborate with the Foundation archive to convey his records on the projects he was involved in during his time at Foster Associates.

Haward was born in Ipswich in 1939. A practising architect, he trained at the Architectural Association in London, where he and Norman Foster first met. This meeting proved to be the start of a very fruitful collaboration where Birkin worked not only as a designer and illustrator but also coordinated the first exhibitions and publications of Foster Associates.

Foster and Haward worked on many relevant projects, such as Climatroffice, the Hammersmith Centre, the Renault Distribution Centre, the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, and Willis Faber and Dumas project.

As of December 2018, the Inside the Archive Initiative and Oral History Programme has committed with several key individuals who collaborated with Foster across his career to record their memories and experience of their collaboration, as well as to donate works to the Norman Foster Foundation Archive. Their recorded insights will augment and deepen the archive, making it a comprehensive, cross-media resource for future generations of scholars. The programme includes architects such as Richard Rogers and John Young, engineers as Loren Butt, Tony Hunt and John Yates, and the quantity surveyor John Walker.