The highs and hellish lows of superstructuralism

Amid the thick of the Crimean war, Florence Nightingale dispatched a plea to the Times deploring the lethal conditions of British military field hospitals. Ten times more soldiers were dying from diseases like cholera and dysentery than from battle wounds. Shocked, the War Office commissioned 49-year-old Isambard Kingdom Brunel to design the world’s first prefabricated hospital.

Components were manufactured to Brunel’s specifications in Gloucestershire then rushed to Turkey for erection. He took the commission on 16 February 1855 and fewer than five months later, the new Renkioi Hospital could accept 300 patients (2,200 by March 1856). Infection rates collapsed. Nightingale called it ‘magnificent’. The new architecture of prefab had triumphed.

Renkioi doesn’t appear in Superstructures, a new exhibition of techno joy-infused architecture at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, though its essence is shared with the buildings which do: off-site fabrication, large volumes enclosed by lightweight materials, a love of engineering, technological innovation — all supporting a social mission.

The show, curated by Jane Pavitt and Abraham Thomas, celebrates the heyday of the high-tech movement. For those who enjoy a tensile membrane or tensioning cable detail, it’s a feast of objects capturing an exhilarating moment of, largely British, architectural experimentation marking the Sainsbury Centre’s 40th anniversary.

The centre weighs 5,618.6 tons. We know this because when its architect, Norman Foster, took Richard Buckminster ‘Bucky’ Fuller to visit the completed structure by helicopter, the acclaimed inventor asked, ‘How heavy is your building, Norman?’ Foster didn’t know but a week later had made the calculations. That seemingly banal question is at the heart of the high-tech story, which was born in ecological utopianism.

In act one, Foster, Rogers, Grimshaw et al launch into the new architectural language with optimistic swagger. Bucky’s calls for designers to ‘do more with less’, and Frei Otto’s Institute of Lightweight Structures, had established the intellectual foundation for an environmentalist form of modernism which accomplishes great spatial feats with remarkably modest means.