High-Tech Architecture vs International Style
ハイテック建築 / インターナショナル・スタイル
Both sit in Modern Architecture, so the question is not what they belong to but how they behave. Both are read here as style. They are reached for with some of the same intent, which is where they get confused.
High-Tech Architecture
Ducts, structure, elevators and joints, all of them normally hidden, are pushed to the outside so that the building reads as an enormous machine.
International Style
Strips ornament and aims at a universal architectural language crossing borders: the box, the free plan, steel, concrete and glass.
| High-Tech Architecture | International Style | |
|---|---|---|
| Era | 1970s– | 1920s–1960s |
| Family | Modern Architecture | Modern Architecture |
| Kind | Style | Style |
| Cues | Exposed services / External structure / Metal and glass / Modules | Rectangular volumes / Glass planes / No ornament / The free plan |
| Best used for | Airports and exhibition halls needing long spans and easy future servicing. · Factories and laboratories where showing the structure and pipework is the message. | Corporate headquarters and civic buildings that must earn trust through proportion, not ornament. · Long life offices and galleries whose partitions move as programs change. |
| Type | Give each service run its own color and use it for wayfinding. | Align sans serif signs to the column grid, flush with the wall. |
| Composition | Push structure and services to the perimeter, leaving the interior clear. | Carry floors on columns so plan and facade both stay free. |
| Material | Exposed steel, gasketed glazing, ducts painted by system. | Steel and concrete frame, white rendered planes, large sheets of glass. |
| Caution | If cleaning and repainting the exposed steel and ducts stay out of the plan, grime and patch marks become the design within a few years. | A white box alone misses the structure, free plan, industrial materials and social program, and ornament stripped without tuned proportion and detail reads as cheapness, leaving openings with no reason for their position. |