Known also as the Industrial Style or Matt Black. This trend emerged firstly in architecture in the 1970s incorporating elements of high-tech industry into building design and featured with simplicity and elegance. Buildings designed in this style usually employed industrial materials and also modern high-tech solutions like hospital rubber carpeting, metal deck plate, office spaces fittings, industrial light fixtures. This term related to achievements regarding styles from modernism - glass, metal, brick and plastic. The style"s premier practitioners include the British architect Norman Foster, and Richard Rogers. Both used industrial elements in designed buildings. Structure according to L. H Sullivana rule, "a form comes out of the function" was externalized but not concealed. Example of this was Pompidou Centre in Paris (Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano, 1971-1977), Hong-Kong and Shanghal Bank (Sir Norman Foster, 1979-1988) and interior décor by Peter Andes, Paul Haigh and Joseph Paula D"Urso. The ventilation ducts, cables, staircases and steel structures were prominently shown on the outside. This was a radical design, as previous ventilation ducts would have been a component hidden on the inside of the building. An access to the building was provided with an outside large tube allowing visitors to enter the building. Pompidou Centre was raised at the very beginning of this trend, still its construction is continually recognized as a turning point and example of buildings whose design was very much functionally orientated. High-tech was present in the architecture of the end of the previous century, but is did not follow original guidelines. With time buildings plans got focused more and more on aesthetic values and constructions of buildings got more complex futuristic forms. High-tech is still present but its original form is very often connected with classic elements.

Source: DESIGN XX CENTURY- Main trends and styles of contemporary design
Lakshmi Bhaskaran, ABE Marketing, Warsaw 2006