Contextual and Cultural Referencing in Art and Design: Context that Changed Design

“High Tech ……”

When earlier on I wrote about Pop Design, I mentioned that one of the styles that replaced it was the High Tech. Actually, the High Tech style appeared for the first time in architecture in the mid-1960s, instilled by the geometric formalism of classical Modernism and the Radical designs of Buckminster Fuller. However, it was during the 1970s that the designers started to adapt the architects’ High Tech ideas into their interior designs.

The High Tech style opposed the excesses of Pop Design. The designs were more sensible. They were created to be useful – for a purpose, rather than for attractiveness.

The pioneers of the High Tech style were British architects, including Norman Foster, Richard Rogers and Michael Hopkins. They made use of raw industrial elements in buildings.

Sir Micheal Hopkins, Architect (b.1935), (2014), Hopkins House (1976) [ONLINE].

Available at: http://www.chambermusicians.org.uk/hopkins%20architect_files/image010.jpg

[Accessed 29 December 13]

galinsky, (2006), Centre Pompidou (Pompidou Center) [ONLINE].

Available at: http://www.galinsky.com/buildings/pompidou/pompidou1.jpg

[Accessed 29 December 13]

The industries’ utilitarian equipment and fittings, which were usually produced for factories and institutions were being used in High Tech interiors – for example trolleys, rubber flooring, clip-on lighting, galvanized zinc shelving and scaffolding poles. The High Tech interiors often included primary colour schemes – a characteristic of De Stijl.

In America, promoters of the High Tech style included Joseph Paul D’Urso and Ward Bennett. They worked with salvaged industrial materials. In 1978 Joan Kron and Susan Slesin published a book about the High Tech. Its title was “High Tech – the industrial style and source book for the home”. However, by that time the style was already declining and in fact, in the early 1980s it was replaced by Post-Modernism. Still, in the mid-1980s, some British designers, including Ron Arad and Tom Dixon, were inspired by the High Tech ideas of using industrial elements, and they created “one-off” designs from salvaged materials – these included scaffolding poles, car seats and manhole covers.