High-Tech, also definde as Structural Expressionism, influenced by engineering and new technologies, it is a style that has a concern with the display of a structure’s construction and services.
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High Tech Characteristics
High-Tech buildings has distinctive exposed structures made of steel and or other metals, exposed services as pipes and air ducts, a smooth, impervious skin often made of glass and a flexibility in the creation of internal service zones, rather than rooms or sequences of rooms.
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High Tech Architects
Norman Foster, after the graduation from Manchester University School of Architecture and City Planning in 1961, won a Henry Fellowship to Yale University, where he obtained a Master’s Degree in Architecture.
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In the early 1970s, Foster had his big break with the project for the Willis Faber & Dumas headquarters in Ipswich, a low-rise office structure that was innovative for its employement of escalators, contoured facades and idyllic, natural-oriented inner spaces. Later on Foster and his team worked on the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation headquarters, a modern edifice with three towers. The ‘90s saw the architect chosen for a restoration Reichstag in Berlin, reinventing the unique glass dome after the unification of East and West Germany. In the early 2000s, Foster also contributed to the iconic New York City skyline with his design of the Hearst Tower.
Following German reunification, two close votations in Parliament confirmed the relocation of the capital to Berlin, and the Reichstag hosting the German parliament, or Bundestag. In 1992 Foster was one of fourteen non-German firms called to participate in a design contest for rehabilitating the Reichstag building, along with eighty German architects.
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Richard George Rogers, is a British architect well known for his modernist and functionalist concepts in high-tech architecture.
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Centre Georges Pompidou, one of his works, took his name from the initiative of the French President Georges Pompidou, however it is often called the Beaubourg due to the area where it is today. This is a large particular building, house for a multi-cultural centre and a museum of modern arts. The project chosen involved three different architects: Renzo Piano and Gianfranco Franchini, the third one was Richard Rogers himself.
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Renzo Piano was born in a family of builders and has always wanted himself to be an architect. The young Piano was deeply interested in buildings and, since he was a child, learned the use of space. He studied at Milan Polytechnic and worked with important architects. He has designed buildings all over the world. His important commissions include San Nicola Soccer Stadium, the Kansai International Airport Terminal, the Auditorium Parco della Musica, and many more.
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High Tech Furniture
The main features of high-tech style furniture are:
- The employement of simple shapes;
- The use of metal;
- tubular structures on the outside;
- Luminous spaces;
- This design is functional;
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