High Tech Architecture E-Book

Angus J Macdonald

• Herausgeber: Crowood
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

High Tech - sometimes known as Structural Expression - is a style of Modern architecture that produced some of the most prominent and visually exciting buildings of the twentieth century. The Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation headquarters in Hong Kong, the Lloyd's of London headquarters in London, UK, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, France. Extensively illustrated with photographs and diagrams, and accessibly written, High Tech Architecture - A style reconsidered discusses the intended meanings of the visual vocabulary involved in High Tech, and places the style in the broad context of other Modern architecture of the twentieth century. The book offers a balanced re-appraisal of the extravagant claims that have been made for High Tech, by its progenitors and architectural critics, as an architecture appropriate for the built environment of the future.

Leseprobe

HIGH TECH

ARCHITECTURE

A STYLE RECONSIDERED

HIGH TECH

ARCHITECTURE

A STYLE RECONSIDERED

ANGUS J. MACDONALD

First published in 2019 byThe Crowood Press LtdRamsbury, MarlboroughWiltshire SN8 2HR

www.crowood.com

This e-book first published in 2019

© Angus J. Macdonald 2019

All rights reserved. This e-book is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication DataA catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 78500 646 3

Frontispiece: Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Norwich, UK, 1978; Foster Associates, architects; Anthony Hunt Associates, structural engineers. (Photo: Sainsbury Centre/Peter Huggins)

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgements

Chapter One The origins of the High Tech style

Chapter Two Early developments: The beginnings of High Tech

Chapter Three Establishing the style: The significant projects of the 1970s

Chapter Four The mature phase: The architecture of corporate finance

Chapter Five Is there such a thing as ‘real’ High Tech?

Chapter Six Stylistic High Tech: A wrong turn on the way to tomorrow?

Selected bibliography

Notes

Index

Preface

HIGH TECH IS A STYLE of architecture which has found expression in several of the most prominent buildings of the late twentieth century, including the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Lloyd’s Insurance headquarters building in London and the headquarters of the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation in Hong Kong, and which, through a wide range of less high-profile buildings, has affected townscapes and rural environments throughout the world. The buildings are notable for their spectacular forms, colourful imagery and visual energy; they have been the subjects of enthusiastic praise from architectural critics and commentators, and have received numerous architectural awards.

High Tech is a Modernist architecture with an evangelical quality that projects a techno-optimist’s view of the relationship between human activity and the wider environment, and many – especially the practitioners themselves – have claimed that it is a forward-looking architecture that anticipates the built environment of the future. This book seeks to explore the strengths and weaknesses of the High Tech style and methodology, and to examine this claim in relation to the realities that underlie its imagery. In particular, the later chapters scrutinize the visionary credentials of High Tech in the context of the now impending global-scale problems of environmental degradation that have serious implications for the management of the material and energy resources required to produce the built environment.

The book does not seek to provide a comprehensive listing of High Tech architecture. I have chosen, rather, to provide detailed analysis of some of the most prominent buildings of the genre, so as to be able to assess their significance. The book is intended to offer both an overview of the enjoyable qualities of High Tech architecture, and a reconsideration of its validity, not only as an expression of the major preoccupations and concerns of its own time, but also as a possible contribution to the built environment of the future.

Angus J. MacdonaldEdinburgh, March 2019

Acknowledgements

ANGUS MACDONALD wishes to thank all those who have assisted with the inception and production of this book: architectural and engineering practitioners whose work is discussed here, especially the engineer Anthony Hunt, whose work has had such a seminal role in the development of the High Tech style; colleagues and students at the University of Edinburgh with whom he has had useful and interesting conversations, particularly the members of his long-running Honours Course ‘Structure and Architecture’, in the joint degree, Structural Engineering with Architecture; and all those who have kindly provided quotations, and the wide range of photographs and drawings that illustrate the text.

He would also like to express very grateful thanks to his wife and professional partner Dr Patricia Macdonald for her continuous support throughout the making of the book, and in particular for her thoughtful, thorough and expert criticism of the text and management of the illustrations.

Chapter One

The origins of the High Tech style

Introduction

HIGH TECH1 is the name given to a style of Late Modern architecture that was characterized by the overt visual use of aspects of a building’s technology, most notably the elements associated with structure and environmental control, to celebrate and express an optimistic view of the role of technology in the development and progress of civilization – an essentially Late Modernist, if not Utopian, view of the future. High Tech produced some of the most strikingly notable and iconic buildings of the late twentieth century including the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation headquarters in Hong Kong (Fig. 1.1), the Centre Pompidou in Paris (Fig. 1.2) and the Lloyd’s headquarters building in London (Fig. 1.3). Some commentators would also include the spectacular buildings and bridges of Santiago Calatrava in their definition of High Tech (seeChapter 5). During its relatively brief period as one of the dominant styles of Modernism, High Tech was also responsible for a large number of less high-profile buildings, including several relatively well known house designs, and was paralleled by a genre of interior decoration and product design (Fig. 1.4).

Fig. 1.1 Hongkong and Shanghai Bank Headquarters, Hong Kong, 1985; Foster Associates, architects; Ove Arup and Partners, structural engineers. At the time of its completion this was the most expensive building in the world – an indication of the extent to which the High Tech style had been adopted and legitimized by the world of corporate finance. (Photo: WiNG/Wikimedia Commons)

Fig. 1.2 Centre Pompidou, Paris, 1977; Piano and Rogers, architects; Ove Arup and Partners (Peter Rice), structural engineers. The Centre Pompidou was one of the earliest High Tech buildings; it clearly demonstrated the principal attributes of the style and brought it to international attention. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

Fig. 1.3 Lloyd’s headquarters building, London, 1986; Richard Rogers and Partners, architects; Ove Arup and Partners, engineers. The ignoring of context was a prominent feature of ‘stylistic’ High Tech that demonstrated its evangelical quality. The architecture was intended to project a message concerning how a Modern society should progress. (Photo: Lloyd’s of London)

Fig. 1.4 Interior, Eames House (Case Study House No. 8), California, 1949; Charles and Ray Eames, architects. The composition of the building from unmodified elements, selected directly from catalogues, contributed to a ‘techno’ style of interior decoration. (Photo: Eames Office, LLC [eamesoffice. com/Antonia Mulas])

High Tech was a style that carried an optimistic message about the future that many found, and some still find, to be exciting. Jonathan Glancey, writing in Superstructure: The Making of the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, found that building to be ‘an exquisite and wholly inclusive silver machine of a building that spoke of a logical, benign and singularly beautiful future informed by the latest in technology, materials and structural engineering … a building that made a confident, technologically inspired future appear convincingly real.’ Jeremy Melvin, in Richard Rogers: Inside Out, endorsed Rogers’ belief that one of the messages of High Tech was that its ‘… architectural aesthetic was a product of ethical thought and the harnessing of modern technology for human benefit’. Nathan Silver, writing of the Centre Pompidou in The Making of Beaubourg found that it had been inspired by ‘the principle of innovation and change’ the ‘spirit [of which] radiates at Beaubourg, and is a truly higher thing’. For many, therefore, High Tech architecture offered a refreshingly original and optimistic vision of a future world that would necessarily be highly dependent on technology and in which that technology could be satisfying, uplifting and even beautiful.

Despite High Tech’s dramatic and influential showcasing of futuristic technology, other commentators have been less enthusiastic concerning its architectural quality. In his discussion of Foster’s Hongkong and Shanghai Bank building, Kenneth Frampton, who preferred the term Productivism to High Tech, offered faint praise by summarising its characteristics as ‘a strange mixture of reality and techno-romanticism’2 and Diane Ghirardo pointed out, of the Centre Pompidou, that ‘the endless indeterminate space and the highly visible and colourful exterior elements made exhibitions of art – its chief mission – difficult’3. Rayner Banham, a balanced commentator on High Tech, was penetrating in his observation: ‘Centre Pompidou is clearly a monument, a very permanent monument presenting what is already a fixed image to outward view, and few of the routine modifications that might be adapted to its services and other externals is likely to have much effect on that fixed image of transparency and tracery, bright colour and mechanical equipment. But can one have a permanent image of change?’4

The argument will be made in this book that the expression of technology in the majority of High Tech buildings was almost purely stylistic, and that the forms of exposed technical elements were often adjusted, to the detriment of their technical function, so as to conform to a visual idea of advanced technology rather than to its reality. For this reason, a clear distinction should be made between High Tech architecture (also known as Structural Expressionism) and another, superficially similar genre of Modern architecture, sometimes referred to as Structural Functionalism, in which technical elements determine the character of a building, without significant adjustment for visual reasons that compromise their function.

Examples of Structural Functionalism are the CNIT exhibition hall in Paris (Fig. 1.5) or the cablenet Munich Stadium (Fig. 1.6) – both long span examples – or the John Hancock building in Chicago (Fig. 1.7), where the trussed-tube structure, designed to provide the required wind resistance in this tall building, was exposed on the exterior. This type of relationship between architecture and technology followed the functionalist tradition of unembellished industrial buildings, such as nineteenth-century warehouses and railway stations. Other examples would include the buildings of the twentieth-century engineers Eduardo Torroja, Pier Luigi Nervi and Felix Candela (Fig. 1.8) and, more recently, the timber lattice shells of Shigeru Ban and Cecil Balmond (Fig. 1.9) and the tapered skyscraper of the Burj Khalifa (Fig. 1.10). The essential characteristic of this type of relationship between architecture and technology– what will be referred to in this book as ‘real’ high tech (seeChapter 5), involving the application of what Rayner Banham has called ‘Advanced Engineering’5 – is that the overall form is not adjusted for stylistic reasons. The most straightforward technical solutions have been adopted because the specification for the structure has approached the limits of what is technically feasible – for example, for buildings of very long span or exceptional height.

Fig. 1.5 Exhibition Hall of the CNIT, Paris, 1958; Nicolas Esquillan, architect. The principal element is a self-supporting reinforced concrete shell. The complexity of the structure was fully justified for the 200m span involved. This was ‘real’ high tech. (Photo: David Monniaux/Wikimedia Commons)

Fig. 1.6 Olympiastadion (Olympic Stadium), Munich, 1972; Günther Behnisch, architect; Frei Otto, engineer. Long-span form-active cable networks allowed the use of a small number of supporting steel masts, located to the rear of sightlines. The distinctive shape of the canopy was determined by the boundary conditions set by the supporting masts and perimeter cable. No formalist architectural input was possible for this long-span structure – another example of real high tech. (Photo: Jorge Royan/Wikimedia Commons)

Fig. 1.7 John Hancock Building, Chicago, USA, 1969; Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, architects and structural engineers. A trussed-tube structure was adopted here to provide adequate lateral strength and forms a major component of the visual vocabulary. This is real rather than stylistic high tech. (Photo: Joe Ravi/Wikimedia Commons)

Fig. 1.8 Los Manantiales Restaurant, Xochimilco, Mexico, 1958; Felix Candela, architect/engineer. The hyperbolic paraboloid shells provide a minimum weight structure. Their shape was determined mathematically rather than stylistically. (Photo: ArchDaily/Wikimedia Commons)

As is discussed later in this chapter, the imagery of High Tech was frequently derived from the dramatic but largely fantastical ideas of futuristic technology, such as appeared in science-fiction films and comics of the early-to-mid twentieth century, or from other visually seductive technologies, such as those associated with the aerospace industry, the application of which was often highly inappropriate in the context of building. Function was not the highest priority; the architecture was principally intended to convey the idea of advanced technology using whatever symbolism was considered by the architects to be the most effective for that purpose. The High Tech style was not alone in this tendency, although it produced the most extreme examples of it: many other Modern architectures, have been concerned principally with expressing the idea and mood only of Modernity.

Although its roots were in early Modernist architecture, graphics, and film, High Tech was principally a phenomenon of the second half of the twentieth century: it emerged as a distinct style in the 1960s, underwent its most vigorous development in the 1970s and ’80s and declined in popularity towards the end of the twentieth century. It was principally a European phenomenon, centred on London where its principal practitioners were located, but it produced significant offshoots in North America and Asia.

Fig. 1.9 Centre Pompidou-Metz, France, 2010; Shigeru Ban, architect; Arups (Cecil Balmond), structural engineers. The 80m-span roof canopy of this building is a timber lattice grid-shell, the form of which was determined from structural rather than stylistic considerations. (Photo: Taiyo Europe/Wikimedia Commons)

High Tech was a form of architecture that bore the signatures of the highly ambitious architects who were its principal promoters, and that was closely linked to their personal preoccupations and rise to prominence. It was also an architecture that had a significant political dimension in a world undergoing a change from the Keynesian economics and egalitarian socio-political ambitions of the immediate post-Second-World-War era, to the more overtly capitalist, neo-liberal political climate that developed towards the end of the twentieth century. It was an architecture that provided an appropriate built environment for that change. Paraphrasing Charles Jencks, in the somewhat Delphic introduction to his perceptive account of another aspect of late-twentieth-century architecture, The Iconic Building: The Power of Enigma (2005), it can be considered as having held up a mirror to some of the major preoccupations of its age:

… Like all good architecture … (it) showed the basic temper of the times, and, as Ruskin said, judged its character.6

Fig. 1.10 Burj Khalifa Building, Dubai, UAE, 2010; Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, architects and structural engineers. Multiple strategies were adopted in the structural design of this ‘mega-tall’ building, in which the principal structural material is reinforced concrete. The Y-shaped plan allows the creation of shear walls in the wings to buttress the central hexagonal core. The tapering profile conforms to the intensity of bending produced by wind loading, which is minimized by aspects of the building’s overall form. Technical rather than stylistic considerations determined the appearance of the building. (Photo: Donaldytong/Wikimedia Commons)

The Architectural Hinterland of High Tech

The state of development that had been reached by Modern architecture by the 1960s, and the roles that individual architects had created for themselves as it progressed, forms part of the essential background against which the phenomenon of High Tech should be viewed. The sources of patronage and the circumstances in which architecture was commissioned were also significant.

By the 1950s, the Modern style in architecture that had been developed in the first half of the twentieth century, as exemplified by buildings such as the Bauhaus School building in Dessau by Walter Gropius (Fig. 1.11) or the Villa Savoye by Le Corbusier (Fig. 1.12), was found to have a number of significant deficiencies. Although it had been enjoyed by many who were sympathetic to its objectives and who appreciated its artistic significance, its clean lines and its uncluttered spaces, the new architecture had also proved to be problematic in a number of respects. Perhaps the most fundamental deficiency was that many of the buildings, the design and general arrangements of which were to a large extent derived from abstract theoretical principles and constructed in new and often flimsy materials, were simply impractical in use: not only as townscape, or as stimulating visual environments, or as sets of spaces that were convenient for living and working in, but also even as weather-proof enclosures providing suitable and comfortable internal environments. The buildings also suffered poor durability, compared to traditional masonry and timber structures, and often quickly lost their pristine freshness to become stained and shabby. Rarely did they function well as sets of spaces in which to conduct the activities for which they were intended – in vigorous pursuit of the idea of architecture as a fine art, aesthetics was often given a higher priority than function in the design process.

Fig. 1.11 The Bauhaus, Dessau, 1926; Walter Gropius, architect. This iconic building exemplified the stylistic treatment that was to become the signature of Modern architecture – lightweight cladding mounted on a visible structural framework in a rectilinear configuration. (Photo: Hjochheim/Wikimedia Commons)

Fig. 1.12 Villa Savoye, Poissy, France, 1929; Le Corbusier, architect. Another of the iconic buildings that determined the visual vocabulary of Modern architecture. Rectilinearity, neatness, straight edges and flat surfaces symbolized the machine aesthetic of the Modern age. The building was mostly hand crafted, however, and therefore lacked intellectual consistency. (Photo: Inexhibit)

With hindsight, many commentators have observed that the approach of many Modern architects was naively simplistic. While it was understandable that these practitioners should have allocated a high priority to the creation of a distinctively new visual vocabulary, they greatly underestimated the complexity of the whole endeavour of attempting to provide a sophisticated society with the buildings that it required. Successful buildings are highly complex artefacts that embody myriad subtle characteristics, affecting everything from the provision of physical properties such as structural stability and durability to the achievement of a satisfying physical environment for their occupants. The considerable complexities that had evolved down the centuries in traditional forms of building were simply ignored by Modern architects, who also underestimated the nuances of the human psyche as these related to the requirements for the built environment. Most people did not wish to inhabit clinically minimalist buildings or to adopt the ascetic lifestyle that this implied. Neither did the drearily monotonous visual environment created by many Modern buildings properly reflect the needs of a pluralistic Modern society.

This monotonous aesthetic was perhaps the greatest deficiency of Modern architecture. The reality was that ‘less’ was not ‘more’, as proposed in Mies van der Rohe’s famous aphorism, but simply ‘a bore’ as in the later remark by Robert Venturi. Or, as Michael Graves commented ‘… the buildings were one-liners and only when the line was very good did they warrant a second look.’7 These are, of course, opinions with which many architects might not agree.

Despite its failings, by the 1950s Modern architecture had become established as the favoured aesthetic for new architecture of all kinds, from dwelling houses to corporate offices and industrial buildings. The Modern architects and their journalistic advocates had won the propaganda war against the traditionalists. Schools of architecture had almost universally adopted the exclusively Modernist Bauhaus method of education. Anyone who commissioned a building, be it a dwelling house, a factory, a school or a corporate office, and who did not desire it to be designed in the new style, was simply considered out of date. A problem for the architecture profession, at the beginning of the post-Second-World-War period, was that, although it was clear that some form of refreshment was required – both to remedy the accumulated deficiencies of Modern architecture and also because a truly Modern architecture had to be seen to change and progress – no clear way forward presented itself.

The response of the architecture profession in the 1950s and ’60s to the problems that surrounded the first wave of Modern architecture tended to exaggerate the difficulties rather than to rectify them. The architects continued to pursue design strategies that favoured formalistic solutions over the creation of truly inhabitable spaces and townscape, and to emphasize the idea that architecture was principally a fine art rather than a means of providing society with necessary infrastructure. As the critic and historian Kenneth Frampton put it, in describing particularly the situation in the USA, ‘practitioners … indulged in the projection of architecture as a form of art … the aim was to validate itself through the media or alternatively redeem its guilt by executing the rite of creative exorcism in isolation.’8

There was, however, no consensus concerning how Modern architecture should develop. The prevailing atmosphere was one in which the more ambitious practitioners were encouraged to pursue individual expression, along with personal fame and stardom. Buildings were designed primarily for consumption by the media rather than to satisfy clients’ needs. The first person singular was much in evidence as architects promulgated their intentions and philosophies; there was much argument about the future of architecture. Charles Jencks, describing the situation in the UK considered that ‘… recent British architecture … [was] saturated with shell-holes of polemic [and] full of old battle lines’.9 As a consequence, Modern architecture continued to fragment into ever more numerous sub-styles.

In the meantime the architects found themselves in a post-war building boom so that the ideological battles were fought out, not only in the pages of the journals, but in the forms of built work which burgeoned as the nations of Europe and North America rebuilt their economies and, in some cases, their ravaged cities also. In the UK, the newly created welfare state was the driving force behind a profusion of new hospitals, schools, social housing and university buildings which provided work for a new generation of architects who subscribed to one version or another of the Modernist agenda.

Most of the ‘Modern Masters’ who had dominated the early Modernism of the 1920s and ’30s were still practising in the 1950s, and each had developed a unique personal style. In the case of Mies van der Rohe this was the refinement of the pristine steel and glass box (Fig. 1.13). Le Corbusier had abandoned the clinical white rectilinearity of his early houses in favour of the primitivist rawness of board-marked concrete (béton brut) in conjunction with a massing of building elements in response to programmatic function (Fig. 1.14). In a separate gesture, Le Corbusier produced the highly individual chapel at Ronchamp (1954) (Fig. 1.15), in which the architect became first and foremost a fine artist, a manipulator of sculpted form. Other prominent and highly individualized buildings of the period which followed similar lines were the TWA Terminal in New York (1962) (Fig. 1.16) by Eero Saarinen, the Sydney Opera House (1973) (Fig. 1.17) by Jørn Utzon, and some later buildings by Frank Lloyd Wright such as the Gammage Auditorium in Arizona (Fig. 1.18) (1964) and the Guggenheim Museum in New York (1959).

Fig. 1.13 Farnsworth House, Illinois, 1951; Mies van der Rohe, architect. Metal and glass at its most controlled and symbolic. (Photo: marco 2000/Wikimedia Commons)

Fig. 1.14 Sainte Marie de La Tourette, Éveux, France. 1960; Le Corbusier, architect. Board-marked concrete, ‘honestly’ expressed, was one of Le Corbusier’s most significant contributions to the visual language of Modern architecture and was in complete contrast to his earlier work. (Photo: Alexandre Norman/Wikimedia Commons)

Fig. 1.15 Chapel of Notre-Dame du Haut, Ronchamp, France, 1954; Le Corbusier, architect. The tyranny of rectilinearity broken. The architect becomes a sculptor. (Photo: A. Bourgeois/Wikimedia Commons)

Fig. 1.16 TWA Flight Centre, Idlewild (Kennedy) Airport, New York, 1962; Eero Saarinen, architect. The free-form geometry of this building was related neither to programmatic and structural function nor to simple mathematical description and it proved problematic to construct. It is an example of the sculptural approach adopted by some of the major architectural figures of the 1950s and ’60s. The building is no longer used for its original purpose and now serves as a 500-bedroom hotel. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

Fig. 1.17 Sydney Opera House, Sydney, 1972; Jørn Utzon, architect; Ove Arup & Partners, engineers. Although often referred to as ‘shells’ (which, in structural terms, they are not), the distinctive forms of this building were constructed as a series of linked semi-form-active portal frameworks clad in non-structural pre-cast concrete panels faced with ceramic tiles. The building was and remains controversial – an architectural icon that was problematic to build and difficult to operate. (Photo: Roybb95/Wikimedia Commons)

Fig. 1.18 Grady Gammage Memorial Auditorium, Arizona State University, 1964; Frank Lloyd Wright/William Wesley Peters, architects. In an architecture style that has been described as ‘Usonian’, the building was typical of the late work of Wright – one of the ‘masters’ of Modernism. (Photo: Visitor7/Wikimedia Commons)

The younger generation of architects who came to prominence in the 1950s and ’60s produced a range of architecture that was even more visually fragmented, as each architect attempted to develop a recognizable individual style. Leading practitioners in the US were Paul Rudolph (Fig. 1.19) and Louis Kahn (Fig. 1.20) – the latter noted for his much quoted concept of ‘served’ and ‘servant’ spaces as a basis for massing and form determination. In the UK, Alison and Peter Smithson pursued an eclectic variation of Le Corbusier’s brutalism that manifested itself in various ways, from the rustic version of Mies’s steel and glass at the Hunstanton School (1954) (Fig. 1.21) to monotonous concrete social housing blocks, which took inspiration from Le Corbusier’s ideas of city planning. Closer adherence to Le Corbusier’s vocabulary of brutal concrete was evident at the Hayward Gallery (1968) (Fig. 1.22) in London, by architects of the Greater London Council. Chamberlin, Powell and Bon amalgamated the sculptural approach of Saarinen and the served-and-servant spaces of Kahn in buildings such as New Hall (Murray Edwards College) at Cambridge (1964) (Fig. 1.23). James Stirling, with his compositions of alternating red tiles and complex glazing, produced distinctively individual buildings in which the massing was largely an expression of internal function (Fig. 1.24), but which in fact functioned so poorly technically as to be loathed by their users and owners.

Fig. 1.19 Art and Architecture Building (Rudolph Hall), Yale, Connecticut, 1963; Paul Rudolph, architect. Influenced by both Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright, the building was much praised initially by critics and academics, but was later described by the architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner as ‘oppressively monumental’. It was fairly typical of the work of the second wave of Modern ‘masters’ such as Rudolph. (Photo: Gunnar Klack/Wikimedia Commons)

Fig. 1.20 Trenton Bath House, New Jersey, 1955; Louis Kahn and Anne Tyng, architects. This is the building in which Kahn first articulated the concept of ‘served’ and ‘servant’ spaces, which would influence much subsequent Modern architecture. (Photo: Smallbones/Wikimedia Commons)

Fig. 1.21 Hunstanton (Smithdon) School, Norfolk, UK, 1954; Alison and Peter Smithson, architects; Ove Arup and Partners, structural engineers. With its ‘honest’ expression of brickwork cladding and steelwork structure this was the first example in the UK of ‘Brutalist’ architecture. Despite winning several architectural awards it proved to be highly problematic in operation. (Photo: John Maltby/Arup Foresight)

Fig. 1.22 Hayward Gallery, London, 1968; Norman Engleback, Ron Herron, Warren Chalk and John Attenborough, architects. This building was contemporary with early High Tech and was representative of the mainstream from which the High Tech architects wished to be distinguished. (Photo: ClemRutter/Wikimedia Commons)