Superstructures: The new architecture 1960-1990
Exhibition and accompanying book interrogating the form of architecture and design known as ‘High Tech’ and its historical and cultural contexts.
- Submitting institution
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Kingston University
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 32-84-1111
- Type
- M - Exhibition
- Venue(s)
- Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts (SCVA), Norwich, U.K.
- Open access status
- -
- Month of first exhibition
- March
- Year of first exhibition
- 2018
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- Yes
- Double-weighted statement
- This output is comprised of two discrete elements: an exhibition comprised of 10 sections with c.150 objects; and a 12,000 book essay which is the central text of the accompanying publication. Interviews and archival research informed both elements. Exhibition research was also collections based. The essay also explored critical contexts for High Tech beyond the scope of the exhibition. The project was commissioned in Autumn 2016 and opened in April 2018. It was Pavitt’s main research undertaking for 16 months from Jan 2017 to the exhibition opening in April 2018.
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- Superstructures (2018) was commissioned in 2016 by the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts to mark the fortieth anniversary of the building, designed by Norman Foster. The 2018 exhibition and its accompanying book was an interrogation of the form of architecture and design known as ‘High Tech’ and its historical and cultural contexts.
Pavitt and Thomas’s research was archival, cultural and historical, and included interviews with key figures such as Michael and Patty Hopkins and Foster, and with architects and curators from the offices of Foster, Richard Rogers and Nicholas Grimshaw. Around 150 exhibits (drawings, models, components, prototypes, design objects, film and photography) were sourced from public and private collections, including the V&A Museum, London, Royal Institute of British Architects, London, Centre Pompidou, Paris, and Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal, as well as company archives. Some objects had not been exhibited before. Pavitt undertook the majority of the UK-based research and was primary curator for the exhibition narrative and installation design. Superstructures was the first exhibition to explore its subject, and re-evaluated the contested term ‘High Tech’, which has been rejected by its architects but has an established place in architectural and design histories. It offered a new way of understanding High Tech by positioning it within a 150-year lineage of engineering, considering its uses of materials and technologies, and exploring its radical roots in the 1960s, through to its global influence on corporate and cultural architecture by the 1990s. It put forward a typology of High-Tech buildings, based around museums, factories, offices, transportation hubs, retail and domestic spaces.
The exhibition was aimed at a general museum audience and those informed about architecture. It presented new academic perspectives, further explored through its book and conference, where Pavitt presented a paper entitled ‘A Tale of Two High-Techs,’ considering both interiors and buildings.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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