Dezeen's introduction to high-tech architecture

由专筑网杨博，小R编译

高技派是20世纪最后一派重要的建筑风格。我们的“探寻高技派运动”系列文章由这篇Owen Hopkins所作的概述开启。

1971年，一场在爱丽舍宫举行的新闻发布会，公布了巴黎博堡地块跨领域艺术中心设计竞赛的获胜者。

发布会上，一侧站着西装革履的乔治·蓬皮杜主席，另一侧则站着建筑师团队：他们长发披肩，衣着休闲，穿着花呢衫、牛仔裤和扎染布衣，其中一位还留着络腮胡子。

High-tech was the last major architecture style of the 20th century. This overview by Owen Hopkins kicks off our series exploring the high-tech movement.
In 1971, a press conference was held at the élysée Palace to announce the winners of the competition to design a new multidisciplinary arts centre on Paris' vacant Plateau Beaubourg.
On one side stood the immaculately besuited figure of President Georges Pompidou, on the other were the architects: long-haired and dressed rather more casually in tweeds, denim and tie-dye. One of their number even had a beard.


承载着高技派建筑理想的蓬皮杜中心。照片由Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners (RSHP)提供

两位而立之年的建筑师，伦佐·皮亚诺和理查德·罗杰斯，所设计的获胜方案比他们的衣着还要更前卫，建筑师设想了一个巨大的钢结构框架，外立面以电梯、扶梯和通风管道作为装饰，从而解放内部空间，使之完全开放，任由改造。

皮亚诺和罗杰斯的方案打败了其他680个参赛方案，更重要的是，它还得以实际建造，成为20世纪后期最伟大的建筑之一，承载着高技派建筑师的无数理想。

The winning scheme being presented by the architects, Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers, then both in their thirties, was even more radical than their appearance. Their design envisioned a vast steel frame, adorned on the outside by lifts, escalators and ventilation ducts, leaving the interior spaces completely open and adaptable.
Piano and Rogers' proposal had beaten 680 other competition entries, but even more remarkably it was actually built, going on to become one of the great buildings of the final decades of the 20th century and embody many of the ideals of high-tech architecture.


蓬皮杜中心为罗杰斯和皮亚诺所设计。图片由Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners (RSHP)提供

这群风格迥异的人物一起站在记者面前肯定是个奇怪的场景，却又有趣而恰到好处地预示了这座建筑未来将成为主流风格与20世纪60年代的先锋文化之间脆弱联盟的标志。而这种联盟又反过来成为“高技派建筑”含意的一部分。

现如今，联盟的平衡已彻底倒向主流风格一边，而高技派及其后来者慢慢变成了一种企业化的现代风格。

有点讽刺的是，高技派标志性的大跨度开放空间特别适合用作金融交易大厅。

虽然高技派的现代企业化风格跟蓬皮杜中心有天壤之别，但对于这样一种灵活性和适应性如此不可或缺的风格运动来说，变成这样也是难免的风险。在其活力和使命感之外，高技派建筑夸张甚至有些不自然的激进造型，也暗示着建筑师内心深处已经知道现代主义的时代即将成为过去。

The contrasting group of characters standing before the journalists must have been a strange sight. Yet, in a funny way it was entirely fitting, prefiguring how the building would end up symbolising an uneasy alliance between the establishment and 1960s radical culture – an alliance which in a roundabout way has come to define what has become known as high-tech architecture.
Today, the balance of that alliance appears to have shifted decisively in favour of the establishment, as high-tech and its descendants have morphed into a kind of corporate modernism.
One of the great ironies of high-tech was that its signature wide-span open spaces were particularly suited to financial trading floors.
Although high-tech's latter-day corporate manifestations are a world away from the Pompidou, this was always the risk for a movement in which flexibility and adaptability were so integral. And for all of high-tech's vigour and sense of purpose, there remains something about its exaggerated, almost mannered radicalism that suggests somewhere deep down its architects knew that modernism's time was nearly up.


如塞恩斯伯里中心一样，高技派建筑常常结构外露，并且跨度很大。照片由Ken Kirkwood拍摄

高技派的起源可以追溯到战后现代主义的高峰期。作为20世纪60年代先锋文化的产物，它有多个发展起源，首先是建筑电讯派，20世纪60年代常驻伦敦建筑联盟的一群先锋建筑师，因其迷人而生动的设计和受波普文化启发的图像表达而为人所知。

从太空旅行到科幻小说，到消费主义、大众文化和维多利亚时代的工程技术和工业设计，建筑电讯派从中汲取灵感，创造出了引人入胜的未来主义城市愿景。

其中一位建筑师彼得·库克的《插件城市》中，想象了一种庞大的巨型建筑，每个独立的模块可以随着技术进步和需求变化而增减。这个想法直接被高技派继承，但也同样没能实现。

High-tech origins go back to the high point of post-war modernism. And as a child of 1960s radical culture, it has several parents. Firstly, there was Archigram, the avant-garde group of architects based at London's Architectural Association in the 1960s known for their seductive, graphic design and pop culture-inspired imagery.
Fascinated by everything from space travel and sci-fi, to consumerism, mass culture and aspects of Victorian engineering and industrial design, Archigram created captivating visions of futuristic cities.
Among them Peter Cook's Plug-in City, which imagined vast megastructures where individual elements could be added and subtracted as technology and requirements progressed – an idea that carried over directly into high-tech and similarly went unrealised.


高技派建筑，特别是蓬皮杜中心，深受塞德里克·普莱斯的娱乐宫的影响。图片由Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners (RSHP)提供

建筑电讯派设想了资源丰富、能源充足的未来。在技术光谱的另一端，是巴克明斯特· 富勒（Buckminster Fuller）和弗雷·奥托（Frei Otto），他们穷尽了建筑材料的可能性，特别是通过拉张结构，这也成为日后高技派建筑的标志性特征。后来又出现了路易斯·康的“服务”与“被服务”空间理念，正好与高技派建筑师交通空间与服务空间分离的理念高度契合。

最后，出现了先进科技与先锋社会性项目相结合的方式，特别是对于建筑思想家塞德里克· 普莱斯（Cedric Price）来说。最有影响力的案例便是Price和剧场导演琼·利特伍德（Joan Littlewood）1961年一起做的娱乐宫。作为新型社区文化空间，娱乐宫模糊了传统的表演和观众参与的界线。

Price拒绝了传统文化机构的纪念性，设想了一座可移动可拆改的框架建筑，以此促进新型的社会文化互动。

很明显，蓬皮杜中心在很大程度上借鉴了娱乐宫的理念，甚至可以说没有娱乐宫就不会有蓬皮杜中心的诞生。蓬皮杜中心能够最终建成，而娱乐宫却胎死腹中，最终取决于建筑师的先锋理念在面对现实世界的实用价值时愿意做多少妥协，以及在高技派运动中非常重要缺常常受到忽视的工程师彼得·赖斯（Peter Rice）的关键贡献。

Archigram's ideas assumed a future of abundant energy and resources. At the other end of the technological spectrum were Buckminster Fuller and Frei Otto who explored what could be achieved through an economy of materials, particularly via tensile structures – which became another familiar feature of high-tech architecture. Then, there was Louis Kahn's idea of "served" and "servant" spaces, which proved highly on high-tech architects' separation of spaces of use from circulation and service spaces.
Finally, there were the ways advanced technology might be aligned to radical social programmes, and in particular the ideas of architect-thinker, Cedric Price. Particularly influential was Price and theatre director Joan Littlewood's 1961 project for a Fun Palace, conceived as a new kind of community cultural space which blurred conventional notions of performance and participation.
Rejecting the monumentality of traditional cultural institutions, Price envisaged the building as a moveable and adaptable framework geared towards the promoting of new social and cultural interactions.
The Centre Pompidou clearly owed a lot to the Fun Palace, and in many ways would have been inconceivable without it. That it got built, and the Fun Palace did not, was due to the architects' willingness to adapt their radical ideas to serve practical, real-world uses, and also the pivotal contributions of the engineer, Peter Rice, a vital and sometimes overlooked figure in the high-tech movement.


Team 4的Reliance Controls电子工厂是高技派建筑的早期案例。照片由Architectural Press Archive/RIBA Collections提供。

早期的高技派项目无一例外都是不起眼的小规模建筑。其中的典型案例便是位于斯温顿的Reliance Controls工厂，为Team 4所设计，这家事务所由Su Brumwell、Wendy Cheesman、诺曼·福斯特和理查德·罗杰斯于1963年创立，没几年就解散了。

工厂于1967年建成，由夸张地裸露在外的笔直框架、纤细的对角拉杆和波纹钢板表皮组成，作为对任务书中关于经济性和施工速度要求的回应。

可能比建筑明显的工业结构更激进的是，建筑中管理用房和车间空间之间缺少分隔，营造了高度灵活的无等级空间，预言了后来罗杰斯在蓬皮杜中心及其后的建筑中传达的理念。

Inevitably, the first high-tech projects were modest and small-scale. A good example was the Reliance Controls Factory in Swindon by Team 4 – the short-lived practice formed in 1963 by Su Brumwell, Wendy Cheesman, Norman Foster and Richard Rogers.
Completed in 1967, the building comprised a radically stripped-back rectilinear frame, thin diagonal tie-beams and corrugated steel facing – a response to the brief's stipulation for economy and speed of construction.
Arguably even more radical than the overtly industrial structure was the building's lack of separation between managers and shop floor, in favour of a highly flexible, nonhierarchical space – again prefiguring ideas that found later form in Rogers' work at the Pompidou and following buildings.


Team 4由Brumwell、Cheesman、福斯特和罗杰斯成立。

Reliance Control完工的当年，Team 4就解散了。罗杰斯和Brumwell成立了工作室，1964年就已结为夫妻的福斯特和Cheesman则创建了福斯特事务所。1971年，福斯特事务所受一家叫Willis Faber&Dumas的保险公司委托，在英格兰东部小城伊普斯维奇设计他们的新总部大楼。

最后建出来的成果，提出了一种新的高技派思路，不再是之前的内部结构外露手法。

Team 4 split the same year Reliance Controls was completed: with Rogers and Brumwell setting up a studio, and Foster and Cheesman, who had married in 1964, founding Foster Associates. In 1971, they were appointed to design a new headquarters for the insurance company Willis Faber & Dumas in the East Anglian town of Ipswich.
The resultant building offered a rather different interpretation of high-tech ideas than the inside-out approach.


Willis Faber&Dumas总部是一种不同以往的高技派建筑。照片由Nigel Young拍摄

这一次，福斯特没有用内部外露的方式让建筑与周边环境产生鲜明的对比，而是利用了当时的尖端技术营造了一面以曲面围护建筑的编织精细的玻璃幕墙。白天，幕墙将小镇景色映照其中；晚上则几乎完全透明，戏剧性地揭开公司内部活动的面纱。

建筑内部以创新的开放式办公和游泳池、屋顶花园餐厅等设施为特色，再加上模范般的节能表现，向开明的企业客户展示了高技派风格的优势所在。

Instead of abruptly confronting its surroundings as an inside-out building would inevitably have done, the Fosters pushed the technology of the day to its limits to create a gossamer-like glass curtain wall that gently curves its way around the building's perimeter. By day, it reflects the town onto itself and by night, it becomes almost invisible, dramatically lifting the veil on the company's activities within.
Inside, the building features innovative open-plan office spaces, and amenities like a swimming pool and roof-top restaurant and garden, which, together with its exemplary energy performance, showed what high-tech could offer the enlightened corporate client.


福斯特设计的香港汇丰银行总部HSBC建成于1986年。照片由Ian Lambot拍摄

蓬皮杜中心给高技派带来了国际性关注，但是Willis总部揭开了下一个十年高技派运动的走向。1986年，随着罗杰斯在伦敦的劳埃德大厦和福斯特在香港的汇丰银行总部的完工，高技派来到了历史上的高光时期。

虽然两栋建筑各有特色，但都通过前沿的工程技术，将建筑内部的结构和设备暴露在外面，从而创造了独特而引人入胜的鼓励职员相互交流的室内空间。同时，两栋建筑也在伦敦和香港这两座迥异的城市中，贡献着持久而强大影响力。

The Centre Pompidou had brought high-tech to international attention, but it was the Willis building that signalled the direction the movement would take over the next decade. In 1986, high-tech reached what in retrospect was probably its high point, with the completion of Rogers' Lloyd's building in the City of London, and Foster's Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporations headquarters in Hong Kong.
Both buildings, albeit in quite different and distinct ways, showed in dramatic fashion how externalising a building's structure and services, again made possible by cutting-edge engineering, could allow the creation of uniquely flexible – and thrilling – internal spaces that encouraged interaction among workers, while at the same time make powerful and lasting contributions to cities as different as Hong Kong and London.


尼古拉斯·格里姆肖设计了位于坎登的Sainsbury’s超市。照片由Historic England Archive提供

虽然高技派与罗杰斯和福斯特的职业生涯有着毋庸置疑的联系，与这场风格运动有关的其他建筑师也创造了各自不同的风格变体，将这场运动带向了不同的方向。

无论是建于1988年位于东伦敦的结构裸露的金融时报印刷厂，还是同样建于1988年带有明显功能主义倾向的坎登Sainsbury’s超市，又或者是2001年建成于康威尔、新未来主义风格的球形穹顶伊甸园项目，尼古拉斯·格里姆肖的作品自始自终都保持着明显的现代主义原则。

High-tech is indelibly associated with the parallel careers of Rogers and Foster, but others associated with the movement created their own variations and took it in different directions.
The work of Nicholas Grimshaw began and has remained more avowedly modernist in its principles, whether in the stripped back Financial Times printworks in east London in 1988, the overtly functionalist Sainsbury's supermarket in Camden, also in 1988, or the neo-futurist geodesic domes of the Eden Project in Cornwall, completed in 2001.


迈克尔和帕蒂·霍普金斯设计了高技派风格的自宅。照片由Historic England Archive提供

与此同时，在1985年创造了他们的太空时代自宅和剑桥斯伦贝谢研究中心之后，迈克尔和帕蒂·霍普金斯（Patty Hopkins）这对组合又设计了劳德板球场（1987）、苏塞克斯格林德伯恩歌剧院（1994）以及议会大厦对面的保得利大厦（2000），展示了高技派风格在古建筑场景中的应用。

在这片历史风格敏感度极高的区域，保得利大厦的融入，对备受争议的高技派运动来说是一次伟大的转变。即使有支持者对维多利亚时期工业建筑风格的热爱，高技派依然常常因其不妥协的美学特征引来批评。

Meanwhile, the partnership of Michael and Patty Hopkins, after creating their own space-age home and the Schlumberger Research Centre in Cambridge in 1985, showed how high-tech could work in historic settings, from Lord's Cricket Ground in 1987 and the Glyndebourne Opera House in Sussex in 1994 to Portcullis House, opposite the Houses of Parliament in 2000.
The assimilation of Portcullis House into such an historically sensitive location is a remarkable transformation for a movement that, despite its proponents' admiration for Victorian industrial architecture, has frequently attracted criticism for its often uncompromising aesthetics.


理查德·罗杰斯的劳埃德大厦建成于1986年。照片由Richard Bryant拍摄，由arcaidimages.com提供

几乎没有建筑受到过劳埃德大厦刚刚建成时受到的尖锐批评。但现在看来，它的外表再合适不过了，一栋应用了工业美学的办公楼，正当英国从工业时代转型到金融服务为主导的后工业时代经济的时期，而这一时期，这种干练的、企业化的高技派风格将成为其标志性的美学特征。

在企业化的命运之外，我们现在仍然能从高技派的早期思想里学到很多东西。随着科技越来越多地主导了我们生活和社交的每个方面，最好的高技派建筑依然清楚地向我们展示着它的解放性的力量，展示着深入人心的社会和民主价值观能够并且应该怎样发挥它的价值，这样科技才能造福于每个人。

1966年，塞德里克·普莱斯（Cedric Price）问道：“科技是答案。但是问题是什么？”仅仅几年后，罗杰斯用蓬皮杜中心必须是“所有人都能使用的场所”的理念间接地回答了他的问题。而在40年之后，这个答案依然无比重要。

Few buildings attracted the vitriol aimed at the Lloyd's building upon its completion. Yet in retrospect its appearance could not have been more fitting: an office building adopting the aesthetic of industry at the very moment of the UK's shift from industrial to a financial services-based, post-industrial economy – of which a slick, corporatised form of high-tech would become one of the defining aesthetics.
Despite this fate, there is still much that the movement's early ideas can offer our present moment. As technology comes to dominate every facet of our lives and social interactions, the best high-tech buildings offer a clear vision of its emancipatory power, of how deeply held social and democratic values can and should inform its use, so that technology is harnessed for the benefit of everyone.
When in 1966 Cedric Price asked: "Technology is the answer, but what was the question?", Rogers answered him indirectly only a few years later with his belief that the Pompidou must be "a place for all people". Over four decades later, it's an answer that remains as important as ever.

文章首页插图由Jack Bedford所作