ABSTRACT
Innovations in design occur when a need or opportunity arises, hence the old adage that “necessity is the mother of invention.” The “high tech” school of architecture in the 1970s, personified by such influential buildings as Renzo Piano and Richard Roger’s Pompidou Center in Paris (1977) and Roger’s Lloyds Building in London (1984), was briefly challenged in the 1980s by the emergence of post-modernism. The subsequent rejection of the objectivity and mechanical instrumentality that had informed the practice of modern architecture through much of the twentieth century gave way to picturesque and historical interpretation. The tectonics and systematic organization of services then received little attention. Later the growing awareness of the limited resources of fossil fuels and their irreversible destruction of the Earth’s climate created a new perspective on the methods of environmental controls in buildings. In Victor Olgyay’s influential book, Design with Climate (1963/1973), he constructs a framework for the interconnected balance between the environmental functions of architecture and technology, and explains working with nature rather than against it.
