High-Tech Architecture: When the Structure Becomes the Expression

High-tech is an architectural style from the 1970s onwards in which the building’s load-bearing structure, ventilation, pipes and lifts are shown openly as an expression. It uses industrial materials such as steel and glass, light, prefabricated parts, and technology as aesthetics. Foster, Rogers and Piano are the style’s leading names.

Facts

The machine as model

High-tech grew out of modernism’s faith in technology. Mies van der Rohe had shown how steel and glass could become aesthetics, and Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace of 1851 was an early proof that prefabricated parts could build large spaces in a short time. In the 1960s the British group Archigram dreamed of mobile, connected cities, and Buckminster Fuller built domes of light rods.

In the 1970s a group of architects, mainly British and Italian, showed how they could make the building a machine. The frame was to be flexible so that rooms could be changed, and the technology was to be visible and easy to understand. That is why stairwells, pipes and ducts were moved out onto the façade in strong colours. Read about the forerunners in the guide to Mies van der Rohe and about post-war modernism.

Centre Pompidou and Lloyd’s

The Centre Pompidou in Paris, designed by Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers and opened in 1977, was the style’s breakthrough. The building turned inside out: escalators in transparent tubes, air ducts in blue, water pipes in green, electrical cables in yellow and lifts in red outside the façade. This left the halls inside free. At first it was met with shock, but it became one of Paris’s most visited cultural buildings.

Lloyd’s of London (1978–1986), also by Rogers, has the same principle. The service towers with toilets, stairs and lifts are placed outside, and the steel gleams. Behind lies an open atrium with offices around a large hall. The building became an icon of London’s financial district and was seen either as visionary or as a rat’s nest of pipes, but it is protected as a heritage building.

Foster and the visible steel

Norman Foster had a cleaner line. The HSBC building in Hong Kong (1979–1986) hangs its floors in enormous steel bridges between eight masts, so no load-bearing columns are needed inside. The façade is full of steel rods and structural parts that show how the building holds together. It was one of the world’s most expensive building projects when it was built.

Foster likes to build with glass and energy-saving solutions. His dome on the Reichstag in Berlin (1999) has a mirrored cone that steers light and air, and the Gherkin in London (2004) uses spiralling ventilation. Beijing Capital Airport Terminal 3 of 2008 and Stansted station show the same delight in light structures. Compare the CCTV headquarters, which takes the technology in another direction.

After high-tech

The style has met criticism. Critics hold that it is expensive, that it hides much of the human scale of rooms and that a steel frame constantly put on show can become as ornamental as the classicism it replaced. Even so the principles have become common property: sustainable buildings, flexible plans and energy-saving technology are often descendants of high-tech. See also the history of the skyscraper.

Several architects carry on in the same spirit, for example Santiago Calatrava with his sculptural steel and concrete structures. The opposite was Postmodernism, which chose ornament and historical quotation, and Brutalism, which let the concrete speak; see postmodern architecture and Brutalism. The period is described under the present and the style contemporary architecture; the design section’s technology and Dieter Rams and good design show the same thought.

How to recognise it

Exercise

Which building was high-tech architecture’s breakthrough in 1977?