Superstructures

‘Superstructures’: High-Tech revisited at the Sainsbury Centre

Norman Foster’s Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts opened 40 years ago, making it an ideal location for an exhibition on the High Tech strand of engineering-infused modernism that came to dominate British architecture.

While some exhibits will be familiar to any student of the period, curators Abraham Thomas and Jane Pavitt have also pulled in many lesser-spotted objects, ranging from a poster for a Reyner Banham lecture and a limpid painting by Ben Johnson of the pool at Foster’s Willis Faber Dumas building to film of Frei Otto at work and a three-metre-long model of the Sainsbury Centre itself.