The Epic of High-Tech Architecture: When the Bones of the Building Stepped into the Light

High-tech architecture is told as the moment buildings stopped hiding how they work, when air, electricity and movement became part of the design. The building appears as an exposed body, its elevators vertical muscles and its joints a new ornament, from the Centre Pompidou, which looked like an enormous factory and gave a square back to Paris, to Richard Rogers's Lloyd's Building with its services in outer towers. Norman Foster's Sainsbury Centre, the HSBC tower in Hong Kong and Stansted Airport follow, with Nicholas Grimshaw, the Commerzbank tower and Renzo Piano's Kansai Airport. The book weighs the criticism that buildings became machines and that technology ages, and ends with a building as a system at work that people must still be able to love.