High-Tech Architecture / Centre Pompidou

The high-tech architecture or techno-architecture is an architectural movement that emerged in the 1970s, incorporating high technology industrial elements in the design of all types of buildings, homes, offices, museums, factories. This high-tech style appeared as an extension of the Modern Movement, beyond the brutalism, using whatever was made possible by technological advances.

When modernism was questioned in England or the United States, and post modernism was appearing, High-tech architecture emerged. Most of the architectures of this movement are build in Europe or Unites States of America.

The most famous architects are Norman Foster, Michael Hopkins, Peter Rice…

The 70’s were for the world a big step, with all the technological advances, like the special conquests thanks to Neil Amstrong, ot the the military area that improve their weapons thanks to those advances. This changes, made people think that technology could help to reach a certain way of life. So people were using technology in their everydaylife, like television.

This architecture is inspired by this way of thinking, and it is also a response to all the modern building, build by le Corbusier and the others, those buildings in concrete all looking alike. Le Corbusier described the house as a machine for living in, but he built houses that were technologically primitive and looked nothing like machines. High Tech buildings do look like machines. Machines are usually mass-produced, either mobile or portable, and made of synthetic materials such as metal, glass, and plastic. These characteristics have become the reference points of High Tech architecture

Look at Norman Foster's Sainsbury Centre for the Visual Arts, and Michael Hopkins' Brewery in Bury St Edmunds. These buildings have very different functions - an art gallery and a warehouse - but they are both simple, finely proportioned metal boxes that make no formal concessions to their particular locations.

The “Centre Pompidou” in Paris is one of the best example to this movement thanks to the skeleton that engulfs the building from its exterior, showing all of the different mechanical and structure systems not only so that they could be understood but also to maximize the interior space without interruptions.

The different systems on the exterior of the building are painted different colors to distinguish their different roles.

One of the "movement" elements that the center is most known for is the escalator on the west facade, a tube that zigzags up to the top of the building providing visitors with an astonishing view of the city of Paris.

The centre was officially opened on January 31, 1977 and has since then integrated high-tech architecture and urbanism as a movement and spectacle for the city to experience everyday.