There is always a dilemma in writing about the British tradition of architecture once called "high-tech", whose best-known protagonists include Richard Rogers, Norman Foster and Nicholas Grimshaw. On the one hand its achievements – the Pompidou Centre, the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, the Eden Project – are magnificent and world-changing, the result of epic efforts of will and daring. On the other hand its rhetoric can be head-bangingly simplistic and blatantly contradictory. Which, if it were only a problem of rhetoric, might not matter much, but it has physical effects in the real world.

To be specific: in the 1970s, when the high-tech style was forged, much was made of its power to create flexible and adaptable structures, with roofs hung off wires so that floors could be unimpeded by columns, and panels and pipes on the exterior that could be switched around at will. There was only ever modest evidence that such strategies worked as claimed, and plenty of examples where they did not. Equally, its protagonists would claim to be problem-solving and practical, yet Foster's Hong Kong tower was reportedly the most expensive building in the world. At which point it had to be justified as a work of art, which is something other than practical.1

• 1. source: http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/feb/09/brits-built-modern-world-foster-rogers