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High Tech is a 20th-century attitude to industrial materials which influenced architecture and design. The name was a 1970s invention for fashionable attitudes to designing buildings and objects for the home, and the cult was the title of a best-selling 1978 book by Joan Kron and Suzanne Slesin, High Tech: The Industrial Style and Source Book for The Home. This book illustrated how to integrate into the home industrial products such as warehouse shelving systems and factory floor coverings. It sparked off a fashion for such products all over the world. The roots of High Tech can be traced back to the ideals of the Modern Movement during the 1920s. In the 1920s, for example, the French architect Pierre Chareau used industrial glass bricks and shop steel ladders in several of his buildings; in the 1930s the Museum of Modern Art in New York put on exhibitions showing the public the beauty of industrial products such as laboratory glass. Later examples include Charles Eames\'s house in Santa Monica, built using off-the-peg factory components, and the 1970s Pompidou Centre in Paris (by Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers), which revealed heating ducts and utility conduits as decorative features for the outside of the building. In the 1980s, High Tech became part of the language of postmodernist design. CMcD |
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