High Tech Architecture

A Style Reconsidered

Angus J Macdonald

• Publisher: Crowood
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781785006456
• eBook ISBN: 9781785006463
• Topic: Architektur
• Subtopic: Architektur Allgemein

High Tech - sometimes known as Structural Expression - is a style of Modern architecture that produced some of the most prominent and visually exciting buildings of the twentieth century. The Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation headquarters in Hong Kong, the Lloyd's of London headquarters in London, UK, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, France. Extensively illustrated with photographs and diagrams, and accessibly written, High Tech Architecture - A style reconsidered discusses the intended meanings of the visual vocabulary involved in High Tech, and places the style in the broad context of other Modern architecture of the twentieth century. The book offers a balanced re-appraisal of the extravagant claims that have been made for High Tech, by its progenitors and architectural critics, as an architecture appropriate for the built environment of the future.

Chapter One

The origins of the High Tech style

Introduction

HIGH TECH¹ is the name given to a style of Late Modern architecture that was characterized by the overt visual use of aspects of a building’s technology, most notably the elements associated with structure and environmental control, to celebrate and express an optimistic view of the role of technology in the development and progress of civilization – an essentially Late Modernist, if not Utopian, view of the future. High Tech produced some of the most strikingly notable and iconic buildings of the late twentieth century including the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation headquarters in Hong Kong (Fig. 1.1), the Centre Pompidou in Paris (Fig. 1.2) and the Lloyd’s headquarters building in London (Fig. 1.3). Some commentators would also include the spectacular buildings and bridges of Santiago Calatrava in their definition of High Tech (see Chapter 5). During its relatively brief period as one of the dominant styles of Modernism, High Tech was also responsible for a large number of less high-profile buildings, including several relatively well known house designs, and was paralleled by a genre of interior decoration and product design (Fig. 1.4).

Fig. 1.1 Hongkong and Shanghai Bank Headquarters, Hong Kong, 1985; Foster Associates, architects; Ove Arup and Partners, structural engineers. At the time of its completion this was the most expensive building in the world – an indication of the extent to which the High Tech style had been adopted and legitimized by the world of corporate finance. (Photo: WiNG/Wikimedia Commons)

Fig. 1.2 Centre Pompidou, Paris, 1977; Piano and Rogers, architects; Ove Arup and Partners (Peter Rice), structural engineers. The Centre Pompidou was one of the earliest High Tech buildings; it clearly demonstrated the principal attributes of the style and brought it to international attention. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

Fig. 1.3 Lloyd’s headquarters building, London, 1986; Richard Rogers and Partners, architects; Ove Arup and Partners, engineers. The ignoring of context was a prominent feature of ‘stylistic’ High Tech that demonstrated its evangelical quality. The architecture was intended to project a message concerning how a Modern society should progress. (Photo: Lloyd’s of London)

Fig. 1.4 Interior, Eames House (Case Study House No. 8), California, 1949; Charles and Ray Eames, architects. The composition of the building from unmodified elements, selected directly from catalogues, contributed to a ‘techno’ style of interior decoration. (Photo: Eames Office, LLC [eamesoffice. com/Antonia Mulas])

High Tech was a style that carried an optimistic message about the future that many found, and some still find, to be exciting. Jonathan Glancey, writing in Superstructure: The Making of the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, found that building to be ‘an exquisite and wholly inclusive silver machine of a building that spoke of a logical, benign and singularly beautiful future informed by the latest in technology, materials and structural engineering … a building that made a confident, technologically inspired future appear convincingly real.’ Jeremy Melvin, in Richard Rogers: Inside Out, endorsed Rogers’ belief that one of the messages of High Tech was that its ‘… architectural aesthetic was a product of ethical thought and the harnessing of modern technology for human benefit’. Nathan Silver, writing of the Centre Pompidou in The Making of Beaubourg found that it had been inspired by ‘the principle of innovation and change’ the ‘spirit [of which] radiates at Beaubourg, and is a truly higher thing’. For many, therefore, High Tech architecture offered a refreshingly original and optimistic vision of a future world that would necessarily be highly dependent on technology and in which that technology could be satisfying, uplifting and even beautiful.

Despite High Tech’s dramatic and influential showcasing of futuristic technology, other commentators have been less enthusiastic concerning its architectural quality. In his discussion of Foster’s Hongkong and Shanghai Bank building, Kenneth Frampton, who preferred the term Productivism to High Tech, offered faint praise by summarising its characteristics as ‘a strange mixture of reality and techno-romanticism’² and Diane Ghirardo pointed out, of the Centre Pompidou, that ‘the endless indeterminate space and the highly visible and colourful exterior elements made exhibitions of art – its chief mission – difficult’³. Rayner Banham, a balanced commentator on High Tech, was penetrating in his observation: ‘Centre Pompidou is clearly a monument, a very permanent monument presenting what is already a fixed image to outward view, and few of the routine modifications that might be adapted to its services and other externals is likely to have much effect on that fixed image of transparency and tracery, bright colour and mechanical equipment. But can one have a permanent image of change?’⁴

The argument will be made in this book that the expression of technology in the majority of High Tech buildings was almost purely stylistic, and that the forms of exposed technical elements were often adjusted, to the detriment of their technical function, so as to conform to a visual idea of advanced technology rather than to its reality. For this reason, a clear distinction should be made between High Tech architecture (also known as Structural Expressionism) and another, superficially similar genre of Modern architecture, sometimes referred to as Structural Functionalism, in which technical elements determine the character of a building, without significant adjustment for visual reasons that compromise their function.

Examples of Structural Functionalism are the CNIT exhibition hall in Paris (Fig. 1.5) or the cablenet Munich Stadium (Fig. 1.6) – both long span examples – or the John Hancock building in Chicago (Fig. 1.7), where the trussed-tube structure, designed to provide the required wind resistance in this tall building, was exposed on the exterior. This type of relationship between architecture and technology followed the functionalist tradition of unembellished industrial buildings, such as nineteenth-century warehouses and railway stations. Other examples would include the buildings of the twentieth-century engineers Eduardo Torroja, Pier Luigi Nervi and Felix Candela (Fig. 1.8) and, more recently, the timber lattice shells of Shigeru Ban and Cecil Balmond (Fig. 1.9) and the tapered skyscraper of the Burj Khalifa (Fig. 1.10). The essential characteristic of this type of relationship between architecture and technology– what will be referred to in this book as ‘real’ high tech (see Chapter 5), involving the application of what Rayner Banham has called ‘Advanced Engineering’⁵ – is that the overall form is not adjusted for stylistic reasons. The most straightforward technical solutions have been adopted because the specification for the structure has approached the limits of what is technically feasible – for example, for buildings of very long span or exceptional height.

Fig. 1.5 Exhibition Hall of the CNIT, Paris, 1958; Nicolas Esquillan, architect. The principal element is a self-supporting reinforced concrete shell. The complexity of the structure was fully justified for the 200m span involved. This was ‘real’ high tech. (Photo: David Monniaux/Wikimedia Commons)

Fig. 1.6 Olympiastadion (Olympic Stadium), Munich, 1972; Günther Behnisch, architect; Frei Otto, engineer. Long-span form-active cable networks allowed the use of a small number of supporting steel masts, located to the rear of sightlines. The distinctive shape of the canopy was determined by the boundary conditions set by the supporting masts and perimeter cable. No formalist architectural input was possible for this long-span structure – another example of real high tech. (Photo: Jorge Royan/Wikimedia Commons)

Fig. 1.7 John Hancock Building, Chicago, USA, 1969; Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, architects and structural engineers. A trussed-tube structure was adopted here to provide adequate lateral strength and forms a major component of the visual vocabulary. This is real rather than stylistic high tech. (Photo: Joe Ravi/Wikimedia Commons)

Fig. 1.8 Los Manantiales Restaurant, Xochimilco, Mexico, 1958; Felix Candela, architect/engineer. The hyperbolic paraboloid shells provide a minimum weight structure. Their shape was determined mathematically rather than stylistically. (Photo: ArchDaily/Wikimedia Commons)

As is discussed later in this chapter, the imagery of High Tech was frequently derived from the dramatic but largely fantastical ideas of futuristic technology, such as appeared in science-fiction films and comics of the early-to-mid twentieth century, or from other visually seductive technologies, such as those associated with the aerospace industry, the application of which was often highly inappropriate in the context of building. Function was not the highest priority; the architecture was principally intended to convey the idea of advanced technology using whatever symbolism was considered by the architects to be the most effective for that purpose. The High Tech style was not alone in this tendency, although it produced the most extreme examples of it: many other Modern architectures, have been concerned principally with expressing the idea and mood only of Modernity.

Although its roots were in early Modernist architecture, graphics, and film, High Tech was principally a phenomenon of the second half of the twentieth century: it emerged as a distinct style in the 1960s, underwent its most vigorous development in the 1970s and ’80s and declined in popularity towards the end of the twentieth century. It was principally a European phenomenon, centred on London where its principal practitioners were located, but it produced significant offshoots in North America and Asia.

Fig. 1.9 Centre Pompidou-Metz, France, 2010; Shigeru Ban, architect; Arups (Cecil Balmond), structural engineers. The 80m-span roof canopy of this building is a timber lattice grid-shell, the form of which was determined from structural rather than stylistic considerations. (Photo: Taiyo Europe/Wikimedia Commons)

High Tech was a form of architecture that bore the signatures of the highly ambitious architects who were its principal promoters, and that was closely linked t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter One: The origins of the High Tech style
• Chapter Two: Early developments: The beginnings of High Tech
• Chapter Three: Establishing the style: The significant projects of the 1970s
• Chapter Four: The mature phase: The architecture of corporate finance
• Chapter Five: Is there such a thing as ‘real’ High Tech?
• Chapter Six: Stylistic High Tech: A wrong turn on the way to tomorrow?
• Selected bibliography
• Notes
• Index