Dramatic and futuristic-looking, Excessive Tech structure is without doubt one of the best-recognised actions of the twentieth century. It additionally helped propel its key proponents – lots of them British – to starchitect standing because it emerged, and their daring, wildly completely different tackle their period’s establishment grew to become internationally acknowledged. Extensively recognised as an structure style born within the UK, due to this – a ‘improvement in British modernist structure from the late Nineteen Sixties’, as RIBA explains on its web site – it was additionally a style seminal in bringing new applied sciences and engineering options into the mainstream and helped outline how we construct at this time.
Norman Foster’s Millennium Bridge
(Picture credit score: Nigel Younger / Foster + Companions)
Excessive Tech structure – a information
Excessive Tech structure, or Structural Expressionism, emerged first within the British structure scene within the Nineteen Seventies. The motion emphasised the seen expression of structural and mechanical programs within the physique of a constructing, which freed inner areas to stick to an ‘omniplatz’ (this meant they may very well be versatile and adaptable to completely different makes use of and flows) and cater to a spread of features.
What’s Excessive Tech structure?
Reyner Banham coined the moniker ‘Excessive Tech’ in his 1966 e book The New Brutalism, describing a brand new techno-functionalist structure style, the place the buildings handled technological parts as decorative. By commandeering an virtually utilitarian, industrial materials palette, the motion borrows from the language of mass manufacturing, hinting at a corresponding populism.
HSBC Fundamental Constructing (1985), Hong Kong, by Norman Foster
Its central tenet is the constructing as an object whose aesthetics are born of its engineering, rendering it a robust demonstration of functionalist beliefs. It additionally nods to Victorian industrial nostalgia, interpreted right here as futurism, making this motion distinctly postmodern.
What makes a constructing Excessive Tech? Key traits embody using modularity in building, profiting from expertise in supplies and manufacturing, seen programs (akin to mechanical and electrical), and an inside-out method, the place practical parts of a constructing, akin to elevators and ducts, turn into central within the aesthetic, seen and defining of the ultimate architectural type.
The precursor: London’s Crystal Palace
Maybe Excessive Tech structure’s most direct ancestor is gardener Joseph Paxton’s well-known Crystal Palace. The prefabricated cast-iron and glass exhibition corridor in Hyde Park was constructed for the Nice Exhibition of 1851 in London. The 564m-long, 39m-high constructing displayed pioneering, for its time, Industrial Revolution period expertise, demonstrating that structure may very well be led by structural programs.
Crystal Palace, archive picture from 1888
(Picture credit score: Getty Photos / © Hulton-Deutsch Assortment/CORBIS/Corbis through Getty Photos)
Key proponents
British architects Norman Foster, Richard Rogers, Nicholas Grimshaw, and Michael and Patty Hopkins are among the many motion’s key pioneers, alongside Italian architect Renzo Piano. All of them operated from the Nineteen Sixties and Nineteen Seventies, testing new floor in each design and building, fusing the 2 in the long run end in a approach that was extra legible on a constructing than ever earlier than.
Frei Otto’s ultra-light designs used tensile buildings – right here, he’s seen with a mannequin for the roofing of the Olympic Park’s swimming corridor, Munich, c. 1970
(Picture credit score: © Werkarchiv Frei Otto)
American architect Minoru Yamasaki (who designed the unique World Commerce Middle in New York Metropolis), German architect and engineer Frei Otto, and Spanish Santiago Calatrava are additionally thought-about a part of the motion – which spurred myriad followers throughout the globe. Nonetheless, the motion’s origins are extensively thought-about unmistakably British.
Ladies and Excessive Tech structure
Ladies’s function in Excessive Tech is woefully under-recognised, regardless of foundational contributions by key representatives. Staff 4, who constructed the Reliance Controls Manufacturing unit, thought-about the primary Excessive Tech constructing, comprised Su Brumwell, Wendy Cheesman, Norman Foster and Richard Rogers.
Hopkins Home, the place the Hopkins lived; the architect died in 2023
(Picture credit score: James Mortimer)
When Staff 4 disbanded in 1967, Cheesman co-founded Foster Associates, and Brumwell co-founded what grew to become the Rogers Partnership. Patty Hopkins co-founded Hopkins Architects. but none of them achieved the identical recognition as their male counterparts.
Excessive Tech structure into the longer term
Regardless of this, Excessive Tech has turn into the dominant legacy of the twentieth century, aided by the longevity of the practices that spearheaded it. With the current deaths of Richard Rogers (2021), Michael Hopkins (2023), and Nicholas Grimshaw (2025), the foundational era has solely simply handed. Modular design, light-weight cladding panels and prefabrication, all ideas that Excessive Tech developed, have turn into synonymous with how we construct at this time.
Reyner Banham warned in Concept and Design within the First Machine Age that architects who resisted expertise risked irrelevance in a world pushed by innovation. Because the constructed atmosphere turns its consideration to survival, that commentary has aged higher than virtually anything related to Excessive Tech structure.
9 key examples of Excessive Tech structure
Hopkins Home, Hampstead
(Picture credit score: Historic England Archive)
When: 1976
Structure: Patty & Michael Hopkins
Hopkins Home is the one residential constructing on this record, accomplished in 1976, Patty and Michael Hopkins constructed it as their very own dwelling in Hampstead: a two-storey light-weight metal and glass construction with virtually no mounted inner partitions. It grew to become a manifesto for the observe, demonstrating that Excessive Tech’s logic of flexibility and uncovered construction might work on the most intimate scale.
Centre Pompidou, Paris
The Centre Pompidou is now closed for main restoration works
(Picture credit score: Sergio Grazia © Centre Pompidou 2023)
When: 1977
Architect: Rogers & Piano
The constructing that introduced the motion to the world was the Pompidou. By externalising all construction, circulation and repair tubing it liberated the six-storey constructing’s inside to show artwork unimpeded. Rogers and Piano gained the worldwide competitors with a proposal to construct on half the location and depart the opposite as public area. Color adorns the completely different service parts likening it to diagrams akin to Archigram’s.
Lloyd’s of London, London
(Picture credit score: Getty Photos / Michael NguyenNurPhoto through Getty Photos)
When: 1986
Architect: Richard Rogers Partnership
It was initially described as a monstrosity, however as with the Pompidou, unfavourable responses have been short-lived. The 14-storey constructing, Housing Lloyd’s of London, was constructed as three towers, every with their very own service towers, surrounding a central 60m-high naturally lit atrium. It was the youngest constructing to obtain Grade I itemizing, simply 25 years post-completion, described by Historic England as ‘one of many key buildings of the fashionable epoch’.
HSBC Headquarters, Hong Kong
HSBC Hong Kong, a key instance of Norman Foster’s structure
(Picture credit score: Bertha Wang/Bloomberg through Getty Photos)
When: 1986
Architect: Foster + Associates
Accomplished the identical 12 months as Lloyd’s, the temporary was to create the perfect headquarters on the planet. At completion, it was the costliest constructing ever constructed. The fee was gained simply ten years after Wendy and Norman Foster arrange Foster Associates and was their first undertaking outdoors of the UK. The 99,000 sq m skyscraper was their first tower; constructed from a equipment of components, the exoskeleton suspends 5 clusters of column-free flooring accessed by zig-zagging escalators that scale a ten-storey atrium. An association that suited HSBC’s buying and selling flooring – radical architects and bankers had turn into unlikely bedfellows.
Kansai Worldwide Airport, Osaka
(Picture credit score: Getty Photos / View PicturesUniversal Photos Group through Getty Photos)
When: 1994
Architect: Renzo Piano
Constructed on a human-made island in Osaka Bay, Kansai is a reminder that Excessive Tech is not only British eccentricity. The terminal’s mile-long, undulating roof’s type is derived completely from engineering logic. Excessive Tech structure is usually efficiently utilized to move infrastructure tailored to completely different locales, substantiating the worldwide fashion.
Reichstag Dome, Berlin
(Picture credit score: Bildagentur-online/Schoening/Common Photos Group through Getty Photos)
When: 1996
Architect: Foster + Companions
The Reichstag is a undertaking through which Foster + Companions added a public walk-in glass dome above the plenary chamber of the parliament constructing, severely broken by a hearth in 1933. It’s a uncommon instance of a retrofit through which a brand new intervention makes a broken heritage constructing practical once more.
Millennium Dome, London
(Picture credit score: RSHP Drawings)
When: 1999
Architect: Richard Rogers and Companions
The Millennium Dome, constructed to mark the daybreak of the twenty first century, was in-built 15 months from standardised parts and underneath price range at £43m, and is a transparent instance of the motion’s optimism for the longer term. Twelve 100m masts, commemorative of the function of Greenwich Imply Time, and the clock face, anchor metal cabling supporting the Teflon-coated glass-fibre tensile roof spanning 80,000 sq m, making a 52m excessive dome. Regardless of the optimism, it was criticised as a logo of presidency waste. The construction, now the O2 Area, has outlasted the controversy.
Eden Undertaking, Cornwall
(Picture credit score: Getty Photos / Hufton+Crow/View Footage/Common Photos Group through Getty Photos)
When: 2000
Architect: Grimshaw Architects
Grimshaw’s two biomes in a reclaimed china clay pit are the clearest assertion of what the motion’s expertise was in the end for. Hexagonal ETFE triple-layered cushion panels supported by geodesic tubular metal domes create climate-controlled ecosystems housing crops from the humid tropics and the Mediterranean. The engineering serves the ecology, not the opposite approach round.
30 St Mary Axe, London
A part of our information to Norman Foster’s structure, 30 St Mary Axe
(Picture credit score: Nigel Younger / Foster + Companions)
When: 2003
Architect: Foster + Companions
30 St Mary Axe, nicknamed the Gherkin, is a 40-storey diagrid constructing whose profile is now a defining factor of London’s skyline. Constructed on the previous Baltic Alternate web site, no Excessive Tech constructing has performed extra to display {that a} single constructing can reframe the picture of town.
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