Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano’s Pompidou Centre
A three-part BBC4 documentary series starting on Thursday (13 February) will examine how a generation of British architects, led by Norman Foster and Richard Rogers, exported their high tech vision around the world.
The first episode of The Brits who Built the Modern World includes their most recent work, such as Rogers’ new “Cheesegrater” skyscraper in London, Foster’s Spaceport America and the KK100 skyscraper in China – the tallest tower ever built by a British architect.
The BBC series will be accompanied by a new exhibition at RIBA headquarters at 66 Portland Place, also called The Brits Who Built the Modern World.
The series and exhibition look at how Foster, Rogers, Nicholas Grimshaw, Michael and Patty Hopkins and Terry Farrell, who were all born within six years of each other in the 1930s, gave 21st Century British architecture an unrivalled reputation around the world.
Their lives were shaped by the optimism of the post-war years and sixties counterculture, and they then went on to break with the European modernist style that had dominated architectural thinking, instead championing the “high tech” or industrial style.
According to the RIBA, their inspiration came from cars, Meccano and engineers. They replaced typically modernist concrete with steel skeletons and lightweight, “clip on”, prefabricated materials – a style that each of them developed individually, but which they all successfully exported, creating a global commodity.
The group designed many of the world’s landmark buildings, from the Reichstag in Berlin to the Pompidou Centre in Paris and The Peak in Hong Kong.
Through drawings, photographs and film, the exhibition also explores the changing identity of cities internationally, looking at how landmark buildings were increasingly commissioned to ‘brand’ or regenerate a city. The exhibition also looks at the technological discoveries that made their structures possible.
Exhibition 13 February 2014 – 27 May 2014
The Architecture Gallery, RIBA, 66 Portland Place, London W1
Clcik here for more
Foster’s Hearst Tower, New York
Terry Farrell’s rendering of Dehli Station
