A late-modern architecture that celebrates technology: exposed steel structures, services moved outside and colour-coded, prefabricated components, flexible column-free interiors and a precision borrowed from aircraft and industry.
High-Tech grew in Britain in the late 1960s among architects who admired the engineering of the nineteenth century (Paxton, Brunel), the lightweight experiments of Buckminster Fuller and Frei Otto, the Eames House, and the fantastic machine-cities drawn by the Archigram group. Its premise was that a building could be treated as a kit of industrially made parts, assembled with the precision of a car or an aeroplane and designed to be adapted, extended or dismantled.
The manifesto building is the Centre Pompidou in Paris (1971–77) by Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers, with the engineers Peter Rice and Edmund Happold of Ove Arup. Its six floors are open plates spanning 48 m on steel lattice girders carried by cast-steel gerberettes; the structure, cross-bracing and an escalator in a glass tube are on the piazza façade, while the ducts and pipes, painted by function, stand outside the street façade. Rogers’s Lloyd’s Building in London (1978–86) hangs its service towers outside the office floors, and Norman Foster’s HSBC headquarters in Hong Kong (1979–86) suspends its floors from giant steel masts and trusses.
Foster also pursued a quieter, sleeker version: the Willis Faber & Dumas offices in Ipswich (1971–75), wrapped in a curving wall of black glass hung from the roof, and the Sainsbury Centre (1974–78), a single shed with all services in the depth of its walls. Later works turned the technology toward environmental performance, with naturally ventilated towers such as the Commerzbank in Frankfurt (1994–97) and 30 St Mary Axe in London (2001–04).
High-Tech never called itself a style; its architects saw it as the honest application of current technology. It is the direct descendant of the modern movement’s faith in the machine, with the difference that the machinery is now shown on the outside.