Structure and architecture
relatively simple – the appreciation of a building as a work of technology. A third type of relationship between architects and engineers, that of a truly collaborative partnership, re-emerged towards the end of the twentieth century. This has involved engineers and architects co-operating fully over the design of a building in a way which had not occurred since their equivalents created the cathedrals of medieval Gothic. The best of the buildings of High Tech have been designed in this way. In the present day, this third category of relationship is producing a new kind of architecture of great geometric complexity. The train shed at Waterloo Station by Hunt and Grimshaw (Fig. 7.17) is an early example. This building may appear to be simply a twentieth-century version of the nineteenthcentury iron-and-glass railway station, with recent technical innovations such as weldable cast-steel joints. It may also appear to be High Tech. In fact, the steelwork possesses a level of complexity which could not have been accomplished before the age of computer-
aided design and which is suggestive of the complexity of a living organism, one of the appropriate metaphors for the philosophies of the emerging organicist paradigm. Although, therefore, this building may be seen as a development of the High Tech style, it is significantly distinct to merit a different name, perhaps ‘organi-tech’. The same could be said of the dome at the National Botanical Garden of Wales (Fig. 7.53) by Foster and Partners with Anthony Hunt Associates, and of the Eden Project (Fig. 7.54) by Nicholas Grimshaw and Partners, also with Anthony Hunt Associates. The realisation of the complex organic or ‘land-form’30 shapes of these buildings gives appropriate visual expression to the sophistication of contemporary technology. They also provide ‘intimations’ in several senses of what might be involved in a ‘reconstructive’ post-modern architectural practice31 even while they remain linked to the Modernist agenda concerned with the celebration of technological progress.
30 This term was used by Charles Jencks in an article in Jencks, C. (Ed.), New Science = New Architecture?, Academy Editions, London, 1997, in which he discussed the nonlinear architecture of architects such as Eisenman, Gehry, Koolhaus and Miralles. 31 See Gablik, S., The Re-enchantment of Art, Thames and Hudson, New York, 1991.
123