ABSTRACT
Out of all the movements to emerge from the ruins of May ’68, it is High Tech architecture that has remained the most faithful to the ideals of the modern movement. Unlike postmodernism, High Tech still subscribes to the values of a heroic modernism: the belief in truth to materials and methods of construction and the faith in technological innovation for the social good. Its architects are the product of a modernist tradition that begins in the rst machine age with the Arts and Crafts Movement and Joseph Paxton (architect of the Crystal Palace), and continues into the twentieth century with Buckminster Fuller, Frei Otto, Charles and Ray Eames, and Jean Prouvé. Drawing inspiration from earlier experiments in prototyping, for example, they work in close collaboration with engineers and manufacturers, much in the spirit of a guild. But if their ideals come from the past, their means are decidedly forward-looking, embracing the technologies of more advanced industries than building. The moniker “High Tech” therefore reects the group’s futuristic outlook, promoted foremost by the architectural historian Reyner Banham, who successively championed contemporary movements that embodied the functionalist tenets of modernism as a form of aesthetic expression, beginning with New Brutalism in the early 1950s. But while these other movements failed to make a lasting impact, High Tech was, for Banham, the one movement that had the substance to endure.1
