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.

Boasting more than 970 alphabetically-arranged entries, the Encyclopedia of Contemporary British Culture surveys British cultural practices and icons in the latter half of the twentieth century. It examines high and popular culture and encompasses both institutional and alternative aspects of British culture. It provides insight into the whole spectrum of British contemporary life. Topics covered include: architecture, pubs, film, internet and current takes on the monarchy. Cross-referencing and a thematic contents list enable readers to identify related articles. The entries range from short biographical synopses to longer overview essays on key issues. This Encyclopedia is essential reading for anyone interested in British culture. It also provides a cultural context for students of English, Modern History and Comparative European Studies.

High-tech Architecture - Preserving the Heritage of Innovative Construction The high-tech architecture of the 1970s–1990s is typically characterized by the use and exhibition of advanced technologies. In terms of appearance, these buildings often have innovative façades, supporting structures accentuated in color, and expressively displayed technology systems. Unfortunately, however, the rapid obsolescence of technology has often led to the complete replacement of the very systems that defined the architectural form. In 2023, an international conference at ETH Zurich in collaboration with Bauhaus-Universität Weimar explored the question of how best to deal with the structural legacy of technologically innovative architecture. This book summarizes the results and provides an overview of the current state of research. Current state of research on high-tech architecture and its conservation Overview of the opportunities and challenges of high-tech buildings New findings on the topic of building within existing structures Also available as a set with the congress volume Denkmal Postmoderne 978-3-0356-2783-1

Part of a series that places buildings within their historical context, thisext considers the Engineering Department Building at Leicester University,he Willis Faber Dumas Building and the Lloyd's Building. It includespecially produced technical drawings that explain how the buildings wereetailed and put together. By looking at the buildings together, the readeran analyze and chart the development of modern British architecture andxamine the distinctive approaches taken by three different partnerships.

Shaping the Surface explores the history of modern British architecture through the lens of surface, materiality and decoration. Picking up on a trait that art historian Nikolaus Pevsner first identified as a 'national mania for beautiful surface quality', this book makes a new contribution to architectural history and visual culture in its detailed examination of the surfaces of British architecture from the middle of the 19th century up to the turn of the 21st century. Tracing this continuing sensibility to surface all the way through to the modern era, it explores how and why surface and materiality have featured so heavily in recent architectural tradition, examining the history of British architecture through a selection of key cultural moments and movements from Romanticism and the Arts and Crafts, to Brutalism, High-Tech, Post-Modernism, Neo-Vernacular, and the New Materiality. Embedded within the narrative is the question of whether such national characters can exist in architecture at all – and indeed the extent to which it is possible to identify a British architectural consciousness in an architectural tradition characterised by its continuous importation of theories, ideas, materials and people from around the globe. Shaping the Surface provides a deep critique and meditation on the importance of surface and materiality for architects, designers, and historians everywhere - in Britain and beyond - while it also serves as a thematic introduction to modern British architectural history, with in-depth readings of the works of many key British architects, artists, and critics from Ruskin and William Morris to Alison and Peter Smithson, Eduardo Paolozzi, Richard Rogers and Caruso St John.

Parametricism is an avant-garde architecture and design movement that has been growing and maturing over the last 15 years, emerging as a remarkable global force. The tendency started in architecture but now encompasses all design disciplines, from urban design to fashion. In architecture, the style has an international following and is currently progressing beyond its experimental roots to make an impact on a broader scale, with practices like Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA) winning and completing large-scale architectural projects worldwide. Parametricism implies that all elements and aspects of an architectural composition or product are parametrically malleable; and the style owes its original, unmistakable physiognomy to its unprecedented use of computational design tools and fabrication methods. All design parameters are conceived as variables that allow the design to vary and adapt to the diverse, complex and dynamic requirements of contemporary society. Although Parametricism has been talked about and hotly debated for a number of years, so far there has been no publication dedicated to Parametricism. The issue is guest-edited by Patrik Schumacher, partner at ZHA, and one of the world's most highly renowned advocates of Parametricism. Contributors: Philippe Block, Shajay Bhooshan, Mark Burry, Mario Carpo, Manuel DeLanda, John Frazer, Mark Foster Gage, Enriqueta Llabres and Eduardo Rico, Achim Menges, Theo Spyropoulos, Robert Stuart-Smith, Philip F Yuan. Featured architects and designers: Arup, Mark Fornes/THEVERYMANY, Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA) and Ross Lovegrove.

This book, originally published in 1988, reviews the development of high technology industries at global and selected national and local levels, providing a unique insight into reasons for and consequences of such modern industrial development. It appraises government policies for assisting the development of this sector and focuses on the fact that high tech industry tends to be concentrated in particular regions of countries which attain the status of 'successful populations'. High technology industry seems to offer little benefit to declining manufacturing areas and the book offers explanations for these regional concentrations and assesses the likely consequences.

The works of Norman Foster from 1993 - 2004 are the focus of this book, the fifth instalment of a multi-volume retrospective. The text about each project is accompanied by colour photographs and detailed plans.

This “sobering tale of the real consequences of gender bias” explores how Britain lost its early dominance in computing by systematically discriminating against its most qualified workers: women (Harvard Magazine) In 1944, Britain led the world in electronic computing. By 1974, the British computer industry was all but extinct. What happened in the intervening thirty years holds lessons for all postindustrial superpowers. As Britain struggled to use technology to retain its global power, the nation’s inability to manage its technical labor force hobbled its transition into the information age. In Programmed Inequality, Mar Hicks explores the story of labor feminization and gendered technocracy that undercut British efforts to computerize. That failure sprang from the government’s systematic neglect of its largest trained technical workforce simply because they were women. Women were a hidden engine of growth in high technology from World War II to the 1960s. As computing experienced a gender flip, becoming male-identified in the 1960s and 1970s, labor problems grew into structural ones and gender discrimination caused the nation’s largest computer user—the civil service and sprawling public sector—to make decisions that were disastrous for the British computer industry and the nation as a whole. Drawing on recently opened government files, personal interviews, and the archives of major British computer companies, Programmed Inequality takes aim at the fiction of technological meritocracy. Hicks explains why, even today, possessing technical skill is not enough to ensure that women will rise to the top in science and technology fields. Programmed Inequality shows how the disappearance of women from the field had grave macroeconomic consequences for Britain, and why the United States risks repeating those errors in the twenty-first century.

During the Industrial Revolution, Britain was at the forefront of bridge innovation. Pioneering designers such as George and Robert Stephenson, Thomas Telford and Isambard Kingdom Brunel created Britain's rich bridge heritage that features many world firsts and we can learn much from their ground-breaking designs. Written by an experienced bridge architect, this book includes an introduction to bridge aesthetics; it gives an outline of British bridge development and advice on parapet treatment and bridge lighting. This book offers a comprehensive overview of how the best of British bridges marry aesthetic considerations with engineering ingenuity.