Structuralism / High-Tech

High-Tech buildings show their structure and services on the outside. Steel frames, cross-bracing and tension rods are exposed, and pipes, air ducts, stairs, elevators and escalators are often placed outside the main volume. Because the structure and services sit on the perimeter, floors inside can be left open, with few load-bearing walls, and rearranged as needs change. The main materials are steel, aluminum and glass, and services are often painted in bright colors to identify them.

The Centre Pompidou in Paris (1977), by Renzo Piano, Richard Rogers and Gianfranco Franchini, has color-coded pipes on its facade: green for plumbing, blue for climate control, yellow for electrical and red for circulation and safety equipment. Rogers's Lloyd's building in London (1986) and Norman Foster's HSBC headquarters in Hong Kong (1985) followed. Dutch Structuralism, grouped here, works differently: Aldo van Eyck's Amsterdam Orphanage (1960) and Herman Hertzberger's Centraal Beheer offices in Apeldoorn (1972) are built from many repeated small units within a fixed framework that users can adapt.

High-Tech grew in Britain in the late 1960s and 1970s from the ideas of the Archigram group and from the lightweight structures of Buckminster Fuller and Frei Otto. Norman Foster and Richard Rogers worked together in the practice Team 4, whose Reliance Controls factory in Swindon (1967) had an exposed steel frame. In 1971 Rogers, Renzo Piano and Gianfranco Franchini won the competition for the Centre Pompidou against 681 entries, and it opened on January 31, 1977, with the engineer Peter Rice of Ove Arup & Partners working on its structure.

Foster's Sainsbury Centre in Norwich (1978) and HSBC building in Hong Kong (1985), and Rogers's Lloyd's building (1986), established the style for large commercial and cultural buildings. Structuralism developed in parallel in the Netherlands. Aldo van Eyck and Herman Hertzberger promoted it in the magazine Forum and at the 1959 Otterlo congress, and Hertzberger described it as separating a structure with a long life from infill with a shorter one.