The “high-tech” style in architecture is easily identifiable by its imagery: revealed structure, visible conduits and aesthetics of mechanical precision. These modes of exposing material and refining the details of connections made further explorations necessary. As long as ducts and diagonal bracing were covered with smooth finishing materials or buried in basements and floor and ceiling layers, architects were primarily concerned with their physical space requirements. But as these elements became glamorous features of occupied rooms and public street elevations, more attention was paid to how they worked, what they did, how they were deployed, and the potential of architectural achievement that lay their essential characteristics. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay One of the first examples of high-tech style was the Center Pompidou, a museum and cultural center in Paris designed by Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano. The center is located on a five-acre (two-hectare) square between the Louvre and Notre-Dame. In 1971, French President Georges Pompidou announced an architectural competition for the center. The design was entrusted to the newly formed partnership Piano+Rogers, and Ove Arup & Partners was engaged as engineer. The competition file called for an “architectural and urban complex which will mark our century”. The team's architectural intention was to provide a great degree of flexibility, an open plaza as a vital extension of interior functions and long building facades that would be "information surfaces". The street side would display traffic data, and the square side would present entertainment and information to pedestrians. The building would be turned upside down, freeing the interior spaces from permanently accommodating traffic and service. And it would depart from the historic character of its urban context in every way imaginable: scale, height, form and expression. Reintegration with the urban landscape would rely on attractive differences rather than gentle harmony. The building presents its own benchmark – distributing vertical circulation components across the length of a pedestrian plaza on the west side and its mechanical workings across the long elevation on the east street side. This public display of components is framed by an exposed steel skeleton and diagonal bracing. The external exposure of the structure and services is actually generated by the programmatic requirements for flexibility of the interior spaces. These machine infrastructures were moved outside the glass skin to leave interior volumes clear and adaptable. The exterior area of ​​the structural frame is there to provide tension forces outside the external columns of the main volume, pulling the cantilevered horizontal members downward to reduce the bending forces on the floor span. This complementary structural strategy eliminates the need for support columns on the 157-foot (53.3-meter) clear interior span. Mechanical and air conditioning services are then placed within the exoskeletal frame, leaving the interior open and adaptable. Inside the Pompidou, public access to areas of the museum is not from escalators, as the exterior of the building seems to suggest, but from doors located in the center of the lower edge of the square. A double-height interior forum connects street level to plaza level in a,.