High Tech

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High Tech. Style (some would deny it is anything of the sort) expressive of structures, technologies, and services by exposing and even emphasizing them, or appearing to do so (the so-called Machine Aesthetic). Some hold that High Tech originated in C19 iron-and-glass structures such as Paxton's Crystal Palace (1851), but its aggressive imagery owes more, perhaps, to Buckminster Fuller, Frei Otto, Archigram, and even Futurism and New Brutalism. The Centre Pompidou, Paris (1977), by Piano and Rogers; the Sainsbury Centre, University of East Anglia, Norwich (1977), by Norman Foster; the Lloyd's Building, London (1986), by Rogers; the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, Hong Kong (1986), by Foster; Schlumberger Research Laboratories, Cambridge (1985), by Hopkins; and the Financial Times Printing Works, Docklands, London (1988), by Grimshaw are among the most paradigmatic High Tech structures. It is also known as the Industrial Aesthetic, and it is really about image. It tends to be expensive to construct and maintain.

Bibliography

Architectural Review, clxi/693 (May 1977), 270–94, clxxix/1037 (Jul. 1983), 14–59;
K. Daniels (1998);
C. Davies (1988);
Forester (1987);
Jencks (1988);
Kron & and Slesin (1979);
Jane Turner (1996)

A Dictionary of Architecture and Landscape Architecture

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High Tech

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