PurplePrice Mag · · 3 min read
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High-tech, also called structural expressionism, is the style of architecture and design that in the 1970s and 1980s turned technology into an aesthetic language. Instead of hiding structures and services, it put them on display: exposed steel beams and ties, coloured pipes and ducts on the outside, large surfaces of glass and aluminium, escalators in transparent tubes. Buildings look like machines or factories and, just like machines, are designed to be flexible, with open interiors that can be reorganised.
The roots
High-tech was born mainly in Britain and took up the ideals of the 1920s Modern Movement: transparency, honesty of materials, fascination with industrial aesthetics, the conviction that each age should express its own spirit. Its forerunners include the English group Archigram, with visionary projects such as Peter Cook's Plug-in City, a megastructure in which each unit could be detached and replaced; the lightweight structures of Buckminster Fuller and Frei Otto; and the house that Charles and Ray Eames built for themselves in California in 1949, assembling in a few days a steel frame made from standard industrial components.
The landmark buildings
The style's manifesto is the Centre Pompidou in Paris, opened in 1977 and designed by the very young Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers with Su Rogers and Gianfranco Franchini. It is an "inside-out" building, with structure, services and circulation on the outside and a colour code: green for water, blue for air conditioning, yellow for electricity. It was followed by Rogers's Lloyd's building in London (1978–1986), with its service towers hung on the outside, and Norman Foster's HSBC headquarters in Hong Kong (1985), at the time the most expensive building in the world. Foster had already designed the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts in Norwich (1978), a great luminous shed for art.
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High-tech at home
The style entered interiors too. In 1978 the American journalists Joan Kron and Suzanne Slesin published the book High-Tech: The Industrial Style and Source Book for the Home, which gave its name to the fashion for furnishing the home with objects from industrial catalogues: metal warehouse shelving, workshop lamps, trolleys, rubber flooring, gratings, laboratory glassware. The idea had an ancestor in Italian design: back in 1962 Achille Castiglioni and his brother Pier Giacomo had designed the Toio lamp for Flos, built from a car headlamp, a transformer and salvaged electrical components, following Duchamp's idea of the ready-made.
Legacy
In the 1980s high-tech coexisted and clashed with Postmodernism, which preferred decoration and historical quotation. But its language never disappeared: airports, stations, museums and skyscrapers all over the world continue to display lightweight steel-and-glass structures. Many of its protagonists, from Foster to Piano, have become among the most celebrated architects of our time, and its attention to the efficiency of building services paved the way for energy- and environment-conscious architecture.
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