High-tech architecture
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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High-tech architecture, also known as Late Modernism or Structural Expressionism, is an architectural style that emerged in the 1970s, incorporating elements of high-tech industry and technology into building design. High-tech architecture appeared as a revamped modernism, an extension of those previous ideas helped by even more advances in technological advancements. This category serves as a bridge between modernism and post-modernism, however there remain gray areas as to where one category ends and the other begins. In the 1980s, high-tech architecture became more difficult to distinguish from post-modern architecture. Many of its themes and ideas were absorbed into the language of the post-modern architectural schools.
Like Brutalism, Structural Expressionist buildings reveal their structure on the outside as well as the inside, but with visual emphasis placed on the internal steel and/or concrete skeletal structure as opposed to exterior concrete walls. In buildings such as the Pompidou Centre, this idea of revealed structure is taken to the extreme, with apparently structural components serving little or no structural role. In this case, the use of "structural" steel is a stylistic or aesthetic matter.
The style's premier practitioners include the British architects Sir Norman Foster, Sir Richard Rogers, Italian architect Renzo Piano and Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava, known for his organic, skeleton-like designs. Early High Tech buildings were referred to by historian Reyner Banham as "serviced sheds" due to their additional exposure of mechanical services in addition to the structure. Most of these early examples used exposed structural steel as their material of choice. As hollow structural sections had only become widely available in the early 1970s, we see much experimentation with this
Examples
- Žižkov TV Tower, Prague, Czech Republic (1992)
- Lord's Media Centre, London, United Kingdom (Future Systems, 1999)
- Irvine Company headquarters, Newport Beach, California, United States (William Pereira, 1968)
- John Hancock Center, Chicago, Illinois, United States (Fazlur Khan, 1969)
- World Trade Center, New York City, United States (Minoru Yamasaki, 1971) (destroyed 2001)
- One US Bank Plaza, St. Louis, Missouri, United States (Thompson, Ventulett, Stainback & Associates), 1976
- Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France (Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers, 1977)
- BNZ Centre, Wellington, New Zealand (Stephenson & Turner, 1983)
- HSBC Hong Kong headquarters building, Hong Kong (Norman Foster, 1985)
- Schlumberger Cambridge Research Centre, Cambridge, United Kingdom (Hopkins Architects, 1985)
- Lloyd's Building, London, United Kingdom (Richard Rogers, 1986)
- Bank of China Tower, Hong Kong (I.M. Pei, 1989)
- Hotel Arts, Barcelona, Spain (Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, 1992)
- Jubilee Campus, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, United Kingdom (Hopkins Architects, 1999)
- 30 St. Mary Axe, London, United Kingdom (Norman Foster, 2003)
- Torre Agbar, Barcelona, Spain (Jean Nouvel, 2005)
- Hearst Tower, New York City, United States (Norman Foster, 2004)
- Marquette Plaza, Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States (Gunnar Birkerts, 1973)
- Beetham Tower, Manchester, United Kingdom (Ian Simpson, 2007)
- Leslie L. Dan Pharmacy Building, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada (Norman Foster, 2006)
- Senedd (English: Senate or Parliament), Cardiff Bay, Cardiff, Wales, United Kingdom (2006)
- Diagonal Zero Zero, Barcelona, Spain (Enric Massip-Bosch, 2011)
See also
- Norman Foster
- Hopkins Architects
- Santiago Calatrava
- Renzo Piano
- Richard Rogers
- Kenzo Tange
- Buckminster Fuller
- Vladimir Shukhov
- Frei Otto
- High tech