By the 1980s, modern architecture was under attack.
"It had failed so badly," some said,
"we'd be better off going back to older styles of building."
But a bold young generation of British architects argued
the exact opposite.
Instead of retreating into the past,
they were building gleaming visions of the future.
During the 1970s, the work
of Richard Rogers,
Norman Foster,
Nicholas Grimshaw,
Terry Farrell
and Michael Hopkins had begun to be seen as a movement -
"high-tech."
In their 20s and 30s, they'd collaborated
and shared a dream of how architecture could change the world.
In middle age, they'd become rivals,
and their work would become increasingly controversial.
Yet a decade which threatened to break them would, instead,
make them.
These were the years when they created some of the towering
achievements of 20th-century design.
They became the most successful generation of architects
Britain has ever produced.
This, in their own words, is the story of how.
# Burning down the house
# Burning down the house! #
Like millions of others in late '70s Britain, Richard Rogers was
struggling to find work, even though he'd already created
a building that was famous all over the world.
I, you know, I used to say nobody wanted another Pompidou.
I think everybody thought we only built Pompidous.
And actually I think people were somewhat afraid,
certainly clients would have been very bold to
make a commission to us after that building,
which was very, very radical at the time.
There was a vacuum,
and I came to a moment in time when I thought I shan't be building
any more buildings. I'm not an architect, I'll be a teacher.
It was very tough, and just at the moment of
the real low of lows, you're thinking,
"Well, maybe it's time to do other things."
We'd made the decision to go into a competition
for the Lloyd's of London building.
The chances of winning seemed slim.
Rogers was a left-winger who thought suits were square.
The City of London was still a bastion of bowler-hatted tradition,
not the sort of chaps you'd expect to be fans of his work in Paris.
I think Beaubourg made us take a deep breath.
For many of us, it is so radical in design, er,
we might have been frightened - in fact we weren't.
They said one of the reasons that we chose you were
because you were very much like us.
And we thought, "Well, that's very strange,"
cos these are traditional City gents
who are the venerated institution. Not a bit of it.
Lloyd's, what do they do for a living? They take risk.
Lloyd's had confidence in spades,
and, you know, Lloyd's were very proud of who they were.
They said to us, "We want a building that will reflect our stature
"within the world."
Rogers certainly delivered a building which made Lloyd's
stand out from the crowd.
Design had begun, however, with another part of their brief -
to maintain their traditional style of doing business.
The marketplace was prime.
They wanted the whole market to feel as if it was trading in one room.
Which it always had done, philosophically,
from its earliest days.
MUSIC: "Paninaro" by Pet Shop Boys
So the heart of the Lloyd's Building is a single, very tall room,
which splits trading over several open floors.
They said, "One of the things we don't want is people in white coats
"fixing services in our trading floors."
As they were making a very large number of millions per day,
in premiums, they didn't want that process disturbed.
"Can you find another place to put the services, please?"
So everything that's a support service is outside.
Developing the inside-out approach
first seen at the Pompidou Centre, toilets, staircases,
pipes and ducts are arranged round the perimeter of the building.
That's where the lifts were put as well.
And not just so they'd be easier for maintenance staff to reach.
Aesthetically, movement can be a very pleasurable thing.
I've never understood why one should get into a lift and rub shoulders
with lots of people you don't know in a dark box like a tomb.
If you put it on the outside of the building, you suddenly get
the view, and movement becomes part of the enjoyment of life,
not just part of the function of life.
Despite the fact they appear to be restrained City gentlemen,
they loved them, too, they're human beings.
Once you get used to the notion of the vertiginous ride, it's fun.
Architects don't like the term "high-tech",
but with creations like Lloyd's, you can see why the label stuck.
It unapologetically uses materials such as stainless steel,
which had once been the preserve of industry - not architecture.
This is a machine for working in, with no superfluous decoration.
Instead, visual stimulation comes from structural engineering.
One of the things about working with architects like Richard
is that it not only has to work,
but when it was finished, it had to look that you could see how
it had been put together
so you could see nodes, connections.
Knuckles and joints.
Which is actually a lot of the logic in these kind of buildings -
you see an object which explains how the thing was built.
Though the high-tech generation had been building since the 1960s,
Lloyd's was by far the biggest project any of them
had yet got off the ground in Britain.
The basic concept of the design had been decided within two years
of winning the contest.
Over the further six years it took to construct, however, Rogers
and his team were still puzzling out exactly how it would all work.
It's the nearest thing I could imagine to being
working on a medieval cathedral
where there is this broad idea of principles
but then the nature of the fabric of it was...
was...was still being designed as it was being constructed.
When the building was...is about to be completed,
the Chairman of Lloyd's said to me, um,
"Why didn't you tell us that it was going to look like that?"
And I remember I said, "But I didn't know."
Because in a sense, until you complete it,
you don't really know where this leads to.
If Rogers' creation resembled a cathedral,
then the god it would worship was money.
The City of London was increasingly turbo-charged
by the time the building opened in 1986, so the flashier
occupants of the Square Mile might have been expected to love it.
It turned out to be a future people weren't quite ready for.
It's a deeply shocking building, and I have to admit I don't like it yet.
I've stood in front of it for a very long time trying to like it.
I hope that the people who live in it like it.
I don't like the fact that we can't operate in there the way
we have throughout the history of Lloyd's.
It is an abortion. It's an excrescence, quite frankly.
When I came to the opening of Lloyd's I sat next to, er,
the Dean of St Paul's, and he said, "What if... Do you feel beleaguered?"
And I said, "Yes, I feel pretty beleaguered."
All the headlines were, you know, "A terrible architect."
The public were not used to this type of building.
Er, so it was the shock of the new.
So on the whole the press saw it as
a destruction of a great historic tradition of the City of London.
The attacks were wounding, because Rogers had tried to make
a building that would get along with its older neighbours.
The area around Lloyd's is primarily medieval.
Therefore when you come along the narrow roads as you approach
the building, you never actually see the building as a whole,
you just see pieces, and the building is designed
to be seen in those pieces.
In a sense, we've sculpted the roofscape
so as to make a building which is anchored
in the City of London by a series of towers
and which will be recognised from considerable distances away.
For Rogers, mixing the old with the new was what architecture
had always done.
But an increasingly conservative, and conservationist,
culture disagreed, as he learned to his cost
while Lloyd's was still being built.
In 1983, the National Gallery held a contest to design a new extension.
Rogers entered something high-tech.
Not only did he lose the competition,
it made him a target
for modern architecture's most prominent critic.
Instead of designing an extension to the elegant
facade of the National Gallery, which complements it
and continues the concept of columns and domes,
it looks as if we may be presented
with a kind of vast municipal fire station.
I would understand better this type of high-tech approach
if you demolished the whole of Trafalgar Square and started again.
But what is proposed seems to me
like a monstrous carbuncle
on the face of a much loved and elegant friend.
I thought the speech that Prince Charles made was
unbelievably rude. I thought it was appalling.
And I think everybody was pretty shocked.
It wasn't as it happens our building, but it could have been.
I was perfectly proud to accept being a carbuncle
in the terms that he had put.
Outside the architectural profession, however, there was
support for some of the Prince's criticisms.
There were terrible problems
with architecture from the 1950s, '60s, '70s,
which emerged very strongly
in the early 1980s.
So as Prince Charles spoke,
many people in Britain were living in concrete apartment blocks
that were leaking, full of damp and condensation,
lifts not working, so all the famous things that people know.
But the Prince wasn't just complaining about the quality
of post-war construction,
he was attacking the whole approach to architecture which Rogers
and his generation believed in - modernism.
I find it hard, I must say,
to appreciate architecture which shouts at you,
strictly utilitarian designs -
flat roofs, uncompromising angles,
an absence of any decoration at all.
The love affair with revolutionary artificial
building materials which so often prove unsatisfactory in the end.
Though the high-tech group built more user-friendly buildings
than the concrete boxes of preceding generations,
they still called themselves modernists.
50 years earlier,
the likes of Le Corbusier had tried to wipe clean the slate
of history. Ever since, architects had believed that only modern forms
could meet the needs of the modern age.
But they could no longer ignore the concerns the Prince had voiced
so powerfully.
The architecture of the future had to find a way
to get along better with the past.
One architect from their generation had been worrying about this
since the '70s.
I think Charles was 99% right.
It was true - most people did like traditional buildings
and traditional architecture.
That's the kind of houses they bought.
It's something that architects had to register,
they had to deal with that.
Terry Farrell had once been seen as part of the high-tech movement.
In the '70s, he co-designed
and lived in this startling tower block.
Effectively, Terry Farrell was
the apostate - he's the one who gave up the
holy grail of pure modernism.
But Farrell didn't want to return to the traditional
styles of building the Prince of Wales was championing.
Instead, he wanted to cherry-pick the best of past and present.
Postmodernism was a response to dreary, dull,
mechanical modern architecture.
It's a hybrid movement of many styles,
many languages of architecture.
You use ornaments, symbolism, colour.
Architects were freeing themselves up to plunder history books
and to use history as a kind of play box.
Architecture had been very stuffy and rigid
and form follows function,
honest expression of materials...
I just put all that completely to
one side and, erm, I suddenly found released, artistically released.
Across the world, postmodernism
seemed to promise a new dawn
for architecture - and it was Farrell who created the first
significant example in Britain.
When breakfast television was launched in 1983,
the commercial service was broadcast from studios designed by Terry.
Hello, good morning, and welcome!
I deliberately made the front look as though it had
origins in the streamline modern of Hollywood. It had sunbursts
and had extruded lettering that went all along right through it,
which various exhibition and other buildings in the '30s had done.
On the canal side it's, I think... By keeping the old wall
and adding a bit of colour, and the kind of colour that you'd find
on canal boats, erm, it's really kept a continuity with the canal.
And then inside, an interior that was pure theatre.
There was something quite special about it.
It was for a television company, it was meant to be dramatic,
it was meant to be playful.
It couldn't have looked more '80s.
Yet its most famous features had been inspired
by architecture from centuries before.
I remember Terry was away on holiday for a long weekend
or something in Venice.
And I was looking around Venice at all these points
and gable ends, and I realised that they always put something on it,
whether it was a cup and ball or a figure or what have you.
And he called me up and said, "I've got it, I've got it,
"I know ex... We must..."
He said, "The buildings here are covered in the most wonderful
"decoration and finials. They would look great on the top of TV-am.
"And we'll do eggcups!"
And he said, "How many pinnacles are there on the rear elevation?"
And he came back and he said, "There are 11."
I said, "We have to build a 12, we have to have a dozen."
And sure enough, we managed to get another one in to have a dozen eggs.
The notorious eggcups - I remember being startled,
and I remember thinking,
"Well, this is an acid test of what I've been saying.
I said, "We're not going to design by committee. If that's what Terry
"wants to do, then in my opinion that is what we should let him do."
It was, you know, OK, bonkers,
but it was enjoyably bonkers at a time where I think the nation
needed a little gaiety both in television and in architecture.
Though TV-am cost just a fraction of its contemporary
the Lloyd's building, it established Farrell
as a major figure in British architecture,
and it proved he could succeed without the man who'd been
his professional partner in the '60s and '70s, Nicholas Grimshaw.
TRIO: # Da, da, da
# Da, da, da... #
In the early '80s, Grimshaw was still building
the kind of uncompromising industrial architecture
which had been the speciality of his partnership with Farrell.
At the time when TV-am was built,
Grimshaw was probably the least fashionable architect
in the entire country because, you know,
he was putting up sort of slick sheds.
Was it Peter Jay who wrote this thing in the Sunday Times
about calling Terry Farrell a genius because of the eggcups?
HE LAUGHS And that got Nick very cross indeed.
I never quite worked out why Terry Farrell
adopted postmodernism with such open arms as he did.
Nick is a very stubborn person, and he's got very firm beliefs.
And, you know, none of that stuff was allowed in the office.
High-tech was now under attack on two fronts,
from postmodernism as well as from the anti-modernism
which the Prince of Wales was seen as championing.
In the early '80s, Foster and Rogers
were traumatised by the style question,
and they started attacking postmodernism by name.
And as a result, the battle of the styles took place,
which was really negative in many respects.
The flavour of the year at that time
was pastiche, of a rather grotesque nature.
I mean, it was the cartoon imagery of classical architecture.
Norman Foster had built an impressive reputation
with his sleek and minimal approach to modern architecture.
But at the end of the '70s, the change in architectural fashions
and economic climate threatened to end his career.
And I remember that period very well. No new projects were coming in.
So we were - although we never said so at the time -
we were pretty desperate.
Foster had entered the Lloyd's competition,
but when beaten to that job by his former partner,
Norman instead looked abroad for work.
MUSIC: "Canton" by Japan
He entered a contest to build the new headquarters
for the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation.
We invested heavily in doing that competition.
If we hadn't won it, I don't know...
Maybe we'd have survived, maybe not.
Foster and his team threw everything they had
into trying to meet HSBC's ambitious brief.
The bank wanted the best building in the world.
Yeah, what does that mean?
I went with Norman to Hong Kong for the briefing that the bank gave.
And unlike any of the other practices
we stayed on for a few days after,
trying to understand better the way in which the bank operated,
to get behind the scenes, as it were.
The bank's first reaction was,
"Well, of course we'd have to tell the other competitors, wouldn't we?"
So I said, "Why would you have to tell the other competitors?
"If we're interested in your bank,
"why would you share it with our competitors?"
"Yes, you've got a point. What can we tell you?"
And they said, "You'll hear something called feng shui,
"and don't worry about feng shui."
So I was immediately curious and I consulted a feng shui man.
He did a drawing,
had a conversation, we paid him a fee.
And actually the final design, as built,
has some considerable similarities to that sketch that was produced!
MUSIC: "Living On The Ceiling" by Blancmange
I think the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank
is one of the great buildings of the 20th century.
If you had to pick a top ten, it would be up there.
# And I'm so tall, I'm so tall... #
And yet in 1979, when Foster won the competition,
he'd never built anything taller than four storeys.
I can remember the day it was announced, and I remember
there were a few glasses of champagne
that we were drinking in the office,
and after a minute or two we started to look round at each other
and realised, "How the hell are we going to do this?"
"We've won it, but now we're going to have to build it!"
The design was far from settled at that stage.
All Foster knew for certain
is that he didn't like most of the towers
which had been built previously.
So many high-rise buildings, in retrospect,
are like so many kind of dumb boxes.
They're anonymous, they're hostile,
the only difference from one floor to the other
is the number on the lift car or the door in the corridor.
There's no progression of space, they're intimidating,
they're soulless.
Foster and his team decided they could do better.
They set out to reinvent the skyscraper.
I think coming to a building type that you've not done before
makes you think very hard.
You have no preconceptions,
you start with a clean sheet of paper.
He just brainstormed it to the nth degree.
In just over a year, something like 5,000 drawings, 500 models.
Models of the structure,
drawings at a close-up scale.
The way that something will bolt together, junction together.
The things that hold the building, drive the building.
I count myself very fortunate
that I worked first for Roger and then for Foster's.
Cos they share a very rigorous approach
where you carefully define all the issues, the problems
you're going to solve before you try to solve them.
Not only two-dimensionally, but also as a model.
Three-dimensional study model here, to explore what it looks like,
how it might assemble.
We tested options, you know, we looked at other ways to do it.
So here we're showing the possibility of a deck
that connects then right out to the water,
in the same spirit of Venice, if you like.
Nothing was designed or built that hadn't gone through
a very rigorous process,
that there were very, very strong reasons that it should be thus.
The bank encouraged us to look at the big wide world
and actually see what was available.
"Don't just come to us with European ideas.
"What's available in America? What's in Japan?
"What's in other parts of the planet?"
The idea of getting all these building components from all over
the world, and of making them conform to one architectural vision.
The scale of its ambition is one reason why it's a great building.
What this exhaustive design process produced
was a structure like no other.
It's questioning the nature of a tall building.
Every tall building up to that point had a central core,
it was like a kebab.
If you took the core from the heart of the building,
which had never been done before,
and you moved it to the edges so you could see through the space,
everybody would have a better working environment.
It's wonderful - the idea of suspending
the whole building from those two rows of masts.
Like a multi-storey suspension bridge.
The vast open-plan interior could be arranged more flexibly
and adapted more easily -
obsessions of Foster and his peers since the '60s.
The suspended structure also gave something back to the city.
What's amazing about the HSBC project is that in Hong Kong
real estate is extremely expensive, and here is the ground floor,
which is usually seen as the grand welcome entrance for most projects.
You know, you come up to this extraordinary bank
and actually all you have are two escalators
coming down to the ground and an extraordinary open plaza.
Then you look up into the belly of this glass building
and realise, "Oh, THAT'S the building, the building's up there."
For a building like that to make such a gesture was profound.
HSBC paid an unprecedented price for their building -
over a billion pounds in today's money.
Shipping components from 80 different countries
and pioneering new industrial processes didn't come cheap.
At that time it was thought to be
the most expensive building in the world.
I talked to the clients, so I knew the people in Hong Kong quite well
and they would defend it as the most expensive building in the world
because they said, "It's a work of art, and any work of art,
" you have to spend as much money as it takes."
Earlier in his career, Foster had specialised in low-cost,
right-on buildings.
Now he'd created the ultimate luxury object for a bank.
A man who'd always sought flexibility in his architecture
was adapting perfectly to the spirit of the '80s.
It was a building which made his international reputation.
After that he could do anything in the world.
It summarised, at the highest level, high-tech.
Only one contemporary project could seriously be considered its equal -
Lloyd's.
The two towers had more than just height in common -
they had similar aims, similar budgets and the same roots.
Foster and Rogers had, after all,
been friends since the '60s as well as rivals.
I think there's no question there was a great competitive element
between Norman Foster and Richard Rogers -
I mean, they spurred each other on though.
To say that there was competition between the two
would be to put it, you know, mildly.
These things sort of came to a head when the traditional cricket match
came up,
and the gloves came off between the people in the two practices.
As the '80s drew on, however, Foster had another serious rival.
One who, like Rogers, had once been his collaborator.
This was the building which proved Michael Hopkins
could be just as inventive as Foster and Rogers,
and secured his place in the front rank of British architects.
It's the research and development base for an oil technology company.
It's on quite a prominent site on the edge of Cambridge,
and you couldn't just stick an ordinary old factory roof on it
if you wanted to.
It needed something more particular.
Like Foster's Hongkong Bank, this structure is suspended from above
rather than supported from below.
Every roof needs to be held up somehow.
You can do it with a forest of columns which fill a whole interior,
or you can stick a maypole in the middle of your roof
and hang it off that pole.
It's a landmark, it's an eye-catcher.
It says, "We're doing something special."
At Schlumberger, Hopkins combined this novel approach to structure
with an innovative new material.
This fabric is collectively known as PTFE glass,
polytetrafluoroethylene,
which is woven glass fibres covered in Teflon.
But it had the huge benefit of being non-stick,
so it's sort of self-cleaning, sparkling in the sunshine,
and the glass fibres are very, very strong.
At the research laboratory,
the fabric covers a central area for mechanical work
as well as staff social areas.
It forms tents, which join together the office
and lab areas running along each side of the plan.
It's not like a boy scout tent or even a circus tent.
They flap about and they don't stand up.
This one has to stand up against all the wind loadings,
snow loadings that any other roof has to deal with,
and it has to be there permanently.
To make a strong enough structure out of fabric,
the engineers sought digital help.
This was one of the first buildings designed, in part, by computers.
In architectural engineering
I don't think anything had relied so much upon the computer.
Software had to specially developed and written
that would compute the shape, or form-find it, as we call it.
Computer drawing was almost unheard of at that time,
and that was pretty special because you didn't start with sketches
and drawings, you started with numbers.
Some people find it very difficult to believe
that a mathematical process could generate a sculpture,
and so we then made a physical model using hand-sewn pieces of canvas
attached to the wires and tension rods with screws and threads,
just to make sure we'd got it right.
This is high-tech as sci-fi.
While postmodernism was playing about with the past,
the remaining high-tech true believers
seemed ever more determined in their pursuit of the future.
So even when building something
as ordinary as an inner-city supermarket,
Nicholas Grimshaw refused to compromise
on his industrial approach.
We didn't waver one inch from our belief
in our new palette of materials, and in modernism generally.
The structure's really - even though I say it myself -
a bit of a tour de force.
You can see these great bunches of ties coming down,
and it sort of gives the building, I think, enormous kind of strength
and impact in the street, instead of being a rather sort of bland box.
Grimshaw gave a nod to his building's older neighbours
in the arrangement of these rods,
which hold down the cantilevered roof.
We put them at the same sort of rhythm as the party walls
of the Georgian houses opposite.
And in an odd kind of way, it does echo the scale of the buildings
on the other side of the street.
I actually think it fits in rather well.
No other supermarket built in the '80s looked anything like this.
But it owed its existence not to shoppers' demands,
nor even Sainsbury's desires,
but to a powerful architects' department at the local council.
We had a sympathetic planning authority,
so we managed to do something quite radical.
Grimshaw's weren't Sainsbury's first choice of architects for the job,
but the die-hard modernists at Camden Council
had rejected all the previous designs
which the supermarket had proposed for the site.
They started off with their standard Surrey farmhouse style,
which is a brick building with a pitched roof.
And then they tried bypass-Tudor,
which there's a pub on the corner, still there,
with, you know, wood nailed onto the outside.
The planners were getting pretty fed up by then, and they said,
"Look, you've tried all these styles on us,
"all we want is a decent building."
And so, somewhat in desperation, I think, Sainsbury's turned to us.
And by that time they were so sort of beaten up, Sainsbury's,
they let us do what we wanted to do.
By odd coincidence, Grimshaw's supermarket
was built round the corner from Farrell's TV-am building.
Within a few metres of each other, the former partners now presented
wildly divergent visions of architecture.
Whereas the back of Farrell's building had responded
to its setting by echoing the colours of nearby canal boats,
what Grimshaw built behind his supermarket
made no concessions to context or tradition.
It was a terrace of high-tech homes, built when most house builders
had reverted to red brick and pitched roofs.
We felt, rightly or wrongly, that the whole site had to be a piece.
And we felt we had developed an expertise in working metal.
And, I have to admit,
we were at that time obsessed with that kind of imagery,
and we aspired to a kind of showroom gleam.
At a time when whole estates
were built in neo-Georgian toytown pastiche,
Grimshaw and his team were sticking to high-tech
with steely determination.
The world will catch up.
I think that was... Putting it bluntly, that was the attitude.
By the late '80s, the world WAS paying attention
to Britain's high-tech architects.
They were treated with increasing respect abroad.
It was on home turf where scepticism remained strongest.
You have, ladies and gentleman, to give this much to the Luftwaffe.
When it knocked down our buildings,
it didn't replace them with anything more offensive than rubble -
WE did that.
This royal broadside was provoked by plans for a major development
next to St Paul's Cathedral,
replacing a 1960s scheme which even fans of modernism
had to admit wasn't very good.
In 1987, an architectural contest was held
to come up with a replacement.
Both Rogers and Foster entered.
But once again, Prince Charles was unimpressed
with all the modern schemes proposed.
None of them, I believe, address the primary problems
of appropriateness and architectural good manners.
I would like to see the kinds of materials Wren might have used,
and the ornament and detail of classical architecture.
Rogers was selected as part of the team
who would build the new Paternoster Square.
After the Prince's intervention, however, his scheme was scrapped,
and the architect was to be further disappointed
when his royal opponent was invited
to debate their differences in public.
Back came this message from Buckingham Palace,
"The Prince does not debate." That's what got my...got me.
Within a democracy, it's not on.
Instead, the two set out their rival visions of architecture
in separate films for the BBC.
I am not interested in copying styles.
That is actually belittling history.
I'm interested in learning FROM history.
There is no need for buildings,
just because they house computers and word processors,
to look like machines themselves.
There seemed no end in sight for high-tech's battle with heritage.
MUSIC: "Moments In Love" by The Art Of Noise
But then, one of Rogers' peers called a ceasefire.
At Lord's Cricket Ground, Michael Hopkins surprised everyone
with a new-found willingness to engage with architectural history.
When I first started work with Michael Hopkins
their architecture was what people would call "high-tech".
But then Lord's was the turning point.
And that's when it began to get quite different.
The first time going to Lord's I was absolutely
sort of knocked out by the place - particularly the Pavilion
which has this marvellous Edwardian light, lacy,
very English summer quality about it.
Hopkins' brief was to replace a crumbling
19th-century part of the ground.
The standard modernist response
would have been to knock it down and start again.
The Mound Stand, as it was before,
was very popular to the cricketing fans.
The roof was shot, but the brickwork underneath was very nice.
And in one of these sort of design sessions where you're thinking
of all sorts of things, I suggested, "Why don't we keep the bottom bit?"
It was one of those sort of suggestions you make
slightly sort of toe-in-water, you know.
"I'm only an engineer, but how about we keep this?" You know.
And that's really what we did.
Rather than inventing something new for it,
we kept the good bits of the Victorian outside wall
and just copied it and extended it on.
And then you rise up from that
in a really gutsy bit of modern engineering.
For a modernist architect to emulate the Victorians was a surprise,
because it smacked of postmodernism.
Brickwork was the antithesis of high-tech - a labour intensive,
messy, piecemeal, site-based process.
But somehow, it captured Hopkins' imagination.
He fell in love with bricks.
Maybe you will get an interesting architecture out of brick,
and it would feel more contemporary if you made it hold
the bloody building up rather than just sticking it on as a facade.
Whenever you see a Hopkins brick pier,
it really does support the building.
It isn't a steel column hidden inside,
which is what most architects would do these days.
MUSIC: "Christian" by China Crisis
Hopkins used fabric for the roof,
as he'd done at the Schlumberger Research Centre
and as he'd go on to do in many future projects.
The result was something even Prince Charles could enjoy.
PRINCE CHARLES: It seems to me to capture the spirit of Lord's,
with a suggestion of marquee tents and Edwardian summer days.
Everyone welcomed it. The Establishment loved it
as well as the progressive architects. It was a great hit.
Other commissions from traditional institutions began to follow.
High-tech was slowly winning over the sceptics.
But it remained a relatively rare sight in late '80s Britain.
The property developers who transformed Britain's cities
during the third Thatcher term much preferred postmodernism.
These were the years when Terry Farrell made the leap
from critically-acclaimed but small-scale projects
to big-budget buildings.
He now had three gargantuan office blocks
under construction in different parts of London,
including one which achieved worldwide fame.
MUSIC: "Safe From Harm" by Massive Attack
It is James Bond's headquarters, MI6!
Like his other office blocks,
Vauxhall Cross was commissioned by a private developer.
Only when the design was well under way
did Farrell learn an arm of government wanted to move in.
I had no idea I was building MI6.
I was told it was a government headquarters,
and we guessed, wrongly, very early on
that it was for the Department of the Environment.
I put the trees on the top
particularly because it was the Department of the Environment.
The building was finished and handed over,
and I was watching television and on the screen,
"The British have announced that this is the headquarters of MI6."
The imposing appearance of the building was inspired
not by its eventual occupants, but by its position on the river.
The Thames brings out of Londoners
a different response of scale and stature.
If you look along the river banks,
you see the buildings much more clearly in silhouette.
They have great stature.
So I argued you could build a palazzo of height and bulk
and drama and scale.
It is a really masterful essay
in this kind of layered contradiction
between steel and glass, masonry - the classical and high-tech -
and in many ways was a high point of British postmodernism.
And it was attacked, of course, by the modernists
for being a little bit Egyptian, being a bit Art Deco,
for being like a set for Aida, the opera - which it is...
I know it's received an awful lot of criticism and so on.
I was told that in the latest James Bond film,
when they blew up the building,
an architect had taken several friends to see the movie
and they all cheered when it was blown up, inside the cinema.
MUSIC: "Enjoy The Silence" by Depeche Mode
The more successful Terry became, the more he found himself
the number one target for the opponents of postmodernism.
I got a huge amount of antagonism thrown at me.
It was partly a case of guilt by association.
There were firms in Britain that took on the mantle
of postmodernism and did some dreadful buildings.
In the hands of the commercial world,
it becomes too much, you know, glitz and bling.
People were thinking this can't develop.
How many more pink and grey shiny granite pedimented buildings
with bobbles on do we want, really?
By 1991, when Farrell's new building for Charing Cross station
was completed, the backlash was well under way.
Tastemakers looked instead to another station
just across the river, being built by Terry's former partner
who'd stayed steadfast to high-tech.
MUSIC: "Voyage, Voyage" by Desireless
Digging of the Channel Tunnel had begun in earnest in 1988,
so London needed a new terminus for the high speed
international trains which would go through it.
It was a very, very hard fought competition,
and we absolutely put everything we had into getting that job.
We knew that it was very exciting,
because the French side were not doing very much to Gare du Nord
so we felt that we could do something rather special.
Something heroic was needed.
The site for the new station wasn't heroic, however -
a tight and irregular bit of leftover land.
It was a bit like being given a foot
and being asked to design a sock to pull over it.
It was a very twisting, difficult geometry.
Normally, the way in a complex shape it would be dealt with
would be to have thousands of different shaped pieces of glass,
and then you would have to marry -
each piece would be a special bespoke piece.
This was the thing that really terrified the project managers -
they saw this convoluted shape
and said, "That will cost you a hell of a lot more money."
We had to, in some way, make the thing
so that we had mass-produced components to bring...
to keep the price down.
To allow the roof to change shape with the site,
the team devised a "loose fit" glazing system.
It's all tiled with regular rectilinear sheets.
The panels overlap, which means that you can get this kind of adjustment.
So each layer goes one over the other, and then by creating
this special set of hands that can move in any direction, that dealt
with the difficulty of joining the glass back to the steel structure.
There was a period in the site offices where you kept seeing
people demonstrating how the bracket works and how it adjusted.
"No, no, no, it's like this!"
SIR NICHOLAS GRIMSHAW: We were involved absolutely
down to the last nut and bolt.
The steel components were specially cast for the project
in a foundry, having been designed by Nick and the team.
There were a number of tubular elements coming into one point -
if we'd rammed them all together and tried to sort of weld them up
in a great kind of gnarled knot, it would have looked horrible.
So what we did was we did this casting like a kind of heart valve,
with short stubs coming out of it for each of the tubes to fit over...
..so it was a beautiful, functional thing.
Waterloo International met with huge public, as well as critical,
enthusiasm when it opened in 1994.
Sometimes everything goes right.
This was going to be a special moment in history,
the first train through the Channel Tunnel, ribbon-cutting with
the Queen and Mitterrand, and we wouldn't have been allowed
to make such an ebullient building, er, for a lesser moment.
Here was a work of uncompromising modern architecture
which didn't upset the heritage brigade.
One reason might have been that elegantly engineered glass roofs
were themselves part of British history -
going back to the Crystal Palace of 1851,
and the first Victorian railway stations.
Those structures had always been a very direct inspiration
for the high-tech generation.
My colleagues Foster and Hopkins would have said
exactly the same thing - it's more or less running
in a straight line from Paxton and Brunel up to the present day.
Paxton, with the Crystal Palace, still holds the record
for the maximum space covered in the minimum amount of time.
Waterloo proved postmodernists weren't the only ones
who could draw inspiration from architectural history.
I think there was a feeling,
"Let's get back to something a little more earthy and serious."
You get sick of postmodernism very quickly.
You know, we were the glass of cold water that everyone
needed to drink after a rich meal, I think.
Like the Grimshaw team,
Norman Foster never wavered from his modernist belief
that well-engineered structures don't need dressing up.
The project he unveiled in 1992 would prove to millions
of visitors each year that high-tech was nothing to be scared of.
British Airports Authority at the time was
headed out by an engineer, Norman Payne.
And he said, quite simply, "I want a new generation airport."
The other challenge he gave us was he wanted the building to be
between 15 and 20% cheaper than any terminal that he'd built previously.
So not only did we have to reinvent the terminal,
it had to be considerably cheaper.
Foster and his team, as was now their custom,
exhaustively analysed the whole concept of airport design.
They found plenty of room for improvement.
So often in earlier terminals, you didn't know where the hell you were,
which way you were facing and which way you were meant to go.
The act of travel raises the level of anxiety in a lot of people,
so what you want to do is to make the experience
as easy, as enjoyable as possible.
Um...and the way to do that is
to provide a terminal building
that gets rid of all the clutter.
It's very open, very clear, easy to navigate.
With the views out, you can see the plane, you know where you're going.
Essentially, Stansted is... is one very large room.
And everything happens in that room as far as the passengers
are concerned, both arriving and departing.
All of the grubby, oily, engineering stuff -
you know, the baggage handling,
the air conditioning - would be in the basement and feed upwards,
so that people would then be separated from
the works of the building.
Traditionally, all of this mechanical plant
had been placed on the roof.
So this idea of turning the building literally upside down
also saved money, because we didn't have to have a great beefy structure
supporting all this heavy plant up in the air.
The roof then only had to keep the water out, and it can let natural
light in throughout the whole depth and footprint of the building.
The trees, as we call them, because they fan outwards, erm,
they hold up the roof, but they also order the space as well,
they give it a clarity, a sense of rhythm,
of order, of movement, of progression.
Compared to the engineering gymnastics
of the Hongkong Shanghai Bank, Stansted is calmer,
more minimal architecture, and easier, perhaps,
for the public to like.
That didn't mean it was easier to design.
In the end, I think that the simplicity is deceptive.
It's like writing a poem - it's easier to write an essay.
This is Foster's genius - that he can make something
intensely difficult seem obvious and effortless.
Having already reinvented the skyscraper,
Foster had successfully reinvented the airport.
That model has been adopted by every architect,
every airport planner - and that, of course, is the ultimate compliment.
It's been very flattering that it has been interpreted
in all sorts of very interesting ways by architects across the world.
Foster and his peers had argued since the '60s that modern
architecture should reflect the advanced technology of modern life.
When they started building airports,
everyone could see their point.
Try to imagine a world
in which the latest aircraft comes into a neo-Georgian airport.
I mean, it's not going to work, is it?
So it seems likely that an airport would commission an architect
like Norman Foster, rather than one of the Prince of Wales' team.
But by the mid-'90s, traditional styles of architecture
were losing out to high-tech even in historic locations.
Foster showed the light, minimal approach he'd used in Stansted
could work equally well in the midst
of the 19th-century Royal Academy in London.
Once, the prospect of an English country house like Glyndebourne
getting a high-tech extension
would have caused outraged cries of "Carbuncle!"
Yet in 1994, even the most traditional of opera goers
applauded the new theatre by Hopkins Architects.
High-tech had proved its versatility and diversity,
and firms which were fighting for their lives at the start
of the '80s were finally booming.
But with their form of modernism rehabilitated,
what need was there for postmodernism?
Farrell was then in the wilderness.
And so for ten years during the '90s,
I never got a single commission in London - where I lived!
MUSIC: "Belfast" by Orbital
Farrell instead set up shop, very successfully,
in Asia, where he spent much of the '90s
building projects like Hong Kong's Peak Tower.
Meanwhile, those who stuck with high-tech
were now in demand across the world.
The architectural axis shifted to Britain, without question,
without question,
and Rogers and Foster were the most influential architects in the world,
I think, at that time.
Eight years after the Lloyd's building caused such a ruckus,
Rogers' London headquarters for Channel 4
opened without a squeak of controversy.
Even the British public now seemed at ease with high-tech buildings,
and their architects were no longer public enemies.
In 1996, Richard Rogers became Lord Rogers of Riverside.
Soon after, he was joined by Lord Foster of Thames Bank.
Grimshaw, Hopkins and Farrell were all knighted too.
Men who had once been radical outsiders
were slowly edging into the Establishment.
MUSIC: "Porcelain" by Moby
Yet, at an age where many would think of retiring,
they showed no signs of slowing down.
In the next programme, the stories behind some of their most
iconic buildings and biggest controversies.
Moving into the heart of power
produced a whole new set of problems.
You can learn more about iconic British designs
and the people behind them
with The Open University's interactive Building Stories.
Go to...
and follow the links to The Open University.