High-Tech Architecture

What is high-tech architecture?

High-tech architecture is a style that accentuates how a building is constructed by showing its structure and services openly. In Slovak it is called high-tech architektúra. The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) describes it as a style influenced by engineering and new technology. RIBA also calls it a development within British modernist architecture from the late 1960s. Instead of hiding steel frames, ducts, pipes and lifts behind finished walls, the designers make them part of the facade and the interior.

RIBA lists these typical features: lightweight materials, smooth and often glazed surfaces, and exposed structures that are usually steel or another metal. Services such as pipes, air ducts and lifts often have bright colours. The internal service zones are flexible, with no fixed rooms. It names Norman Foster and Richard Rogers as the central architects and also features Nicholas Grimshaw. The name does not mean that the building is full of automation. It refers to the engineering look and to the open view of how the building is made.

Where did high-tech architecture come from?

RIBA places the start in the late 1960s, with the main changes made in the 1970s. The architects worked in Britain, and the style grew inside the modern movement rather than against it. It kept the modern interest in lightness and new methods. It added the idea that the machinery of a building could be its visible character.

The Centre Pompidou in Paris is the best-known case. The Centre Pompidou states that building works began in May 1972 with two young architects, Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers, at the helm. Valéry Giscard d'Estaing inaugurated it on 31 January 1977. The Czech architecture portal archiweb gives the competition date as 15 July 1971 and says that nearly 700 architects took part.

How does the Centre Pompidou show the principle?

The architects placed the systems for ventilation, electricity and water on the outside of the building. The lifts and escalators are outside too. The exposed metal framework is white. Each of the six interior levels offers a fully modular floor area of 7,000 square metres, which the centre calls completely free and usable.

The outside services are colour-coded. According to the Pompidou, blue marks air flows, yellow marks electricity, green marks water circuits and red marks pedestrian flow, meaning the escalators and lifts. The practical gain is that a visitor can read the building, and that the floors stay open for any arrangement.

Which buildings and architects are linked to the style?

RIBA lists these buildings in its high-tech overview. The second table adds the Pritzker Architecture Prize years of three of the architects, as shown on the prize's laureate list. The years date each career and do not rank the architects.

Building	Architect	Year (RIBA)
Willis Faber and Dumas head office, Ipswich	Foster Associates	1975
Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Norwich	Norman Foster	1978
Lloyd's building, Lime Street, London	Richard Rogers Partnership	1986
Mound Stand, Lord's Cricket Ground	Michael Hopkins and Partners	1987
British Pavilion, Expo '92, Seville	Nicholas Grimshaw	1992

Architect	Pritzker Prize year	Link to the style
Renzo Piano	1998	Co-designed the Centre Pompidou with Richard Rogers
Norman Foster	1999	Named by RIBA as a central architect of the style
Richard Rogers	2007	Co-designed the Centre Pompidou, and his practice designed Lloyd's

A UK government press release says that the Richard Rogers Partnership designed the Lloyd's building and that it opened in 1986. The release also records its Grade I listed status. The release describes it as a twentieth-century high-tech office building identified from the outside by six towers around the core.

How do you recognise a high-tech building?

Look first at the frame, then at the services, and last at the lifts and stairs. In a high-tech building the frame is usually metal and left visible. The ducts and pipes are visible and often coloured. The lifts sit outside the main floor area, as at the Centre Pompidou and, through its towers, at Lloyd's. Inside, the floor plan is flexible because the services do not cut it into fixed rooms.

It is not enough that a pipe is visible. The style depends on an organised system in which the structure, the services and the circulation each have a clear place. Random exposed pipework does not make a building high-tech.

How is high-tech architecture related to modernism and brutalism?

RIBA presents high-tech as part of British modernism, so it shares the modern interest in new techniques and honest construction. For the wider movement, read the entry on modernism. For another style that shows how a building is made, but through heavy raw concrete, read the entry on brutalism. The high-tech buildings above are instead built from lightweight metal frames and glazed or panelled skins, as RIBA describes.

Can a Slovak family house be high-tech?

A full high-tech building is rare for a family house, but a smaller version is possible. A designer can leave one steel or timber element visible in the living room or run a coloured service duct along a wall. This is a design choice to discuss with the architect at the start of the project.

• Ask the structural engineer to check any beam or column that you leave without cladding. The calculation, and not the look of the member, decides its size and its fire resistance.
• Plan the route of every visible duct and pipe from the first drawings. Nobody can turn a hidden route into a visible one at the end.
• Choose glazing and shading together with the energy design, so that a glazed facade does not overheat the rooms.

The Centre Pompidou shows that the idea scales to a large public building. A house needs far fewer exposed elements, and each of them must be placed and finished on purpose.