The past four decades have seen one of the largest building programmes in the history of architecture. The world has literally been reshaped. This extensive building programme began with the need to rebuild, renew and reinstate after the ravages of the Second World War. Housing took priority, and from an architectural point of view, it appeared there was stylistically only one way to go: along the lines of the pre-war international Modern Movement. “Modernism” had set out new “scientific” ways of building. Most importantly it offered the attraction of mass and serial production, as well as industrial and prefabrication processes ? nothing could have been more appropriate and useful in a period that demanded fast, efficient and economic building. New, large-scale housing projects, schools, hospitals, and offices appeared everywhere. New towns were started and soon a growing private market for town centre redevelopment established itself in the Western countries. However, because of the complexity of the projects, architecture became more a teamwork activity. But its aspirations still lay with the so-called pioneers of modern architecture: Gropius, Mendelsohn, Mies Van Der Rohe and Le Corbusier.

An ideological clash among generations occurred in the Modern Movement’s co-ordinating organization CIAM in the mid 1950s. A group of younger architects felt that the older Modernists were too doctrinaire and that their architecture was both impersonal and inflexible. Thus, CIAM was superseded by “Team 10″, which included Aldo Van Eyck (Holland), Georges Candilis (France), Ralph Erskine (Sweden), Reima Pietila (Finland) and Alison and Peter Smithson (Britain). The latter were closely associated with the social content of architecture, with questions of “identity” in buildings and the so-called “New Brutalism”. This term seems to have derived from two main sources: Le Corbusier’s use of beton brut and its tough appearance, and the exposed services and materials of its key monument, a new school at Hunstanton, Norfolk, in 1957 by the Smithsons. The term is also often applied to the unadorned raw concrete of buildings like the London South Bank complex (including Denys Lasdun’s National Theatre). It heralded one aspect of a new era, while another was the “free-form” design of Le Corbusier’s Ronchamp Chapel, the originality and freshness of which surprised even the young revolutionaries. It led to a host of free architectural compositions from Saarinen’s TWA terminal in New York, and Utzon’s Sydney Opera House, to Ton Albert’s HMB buildings in Amsterdam.

The Pompidou Centre in Paris by Piano and Rogers represented a break in another direction. As a museum it was to be viewed as a cultural “machine”. One of the first major essays in the new “High-Tech” manner in the history of architecture, it was rooted in the science fiction ideas of the British ARCHIGRAM group of designers. Engineering, or High- Tech, architecture carries on the Modernist tradition of the simple functional shed, albeit with external guts or services a la Lloyds Building in London, also by Richard Rogers.