Continuing our high-tech architecture series, Catherine Slessor looks at how the women in Team 4 helped shape the narrative of the movement.

All architecture is a leap into an unknowable future, but how will history regard high-tech" As a movement, it now does seem more like an ending than a beginning; a rarified sub-stratum of architectural geology, rather like German rococo churches, becoming ever more phantasmagorically fiddly until it ultimately implodes.
It also still has that slightly unhealthy, obsessive whiff of a teenage boy's bedroom, as a generation of postwar men who grew up playing with Mecanoo took their models out of the playroom and into the world.
High-tech was a supreme toys-for-the-boys moment. With its roots in Victorian engineering puissance spliced with the cartoon provocation of Reyner Banham and Cedric Price (architecture's Hunter S Thompson and Kingsley Amis), this is hardly surprising. The oil-rig-on-speed aesthetic of the Pompidou Centre still oozes testosterone, despite the Sisyphean challenge of its long term maintenance. Yet high-tech did have its unsung female proponents, who enabled, facilitated, supported and created. Unpicking and defining their contributions is a slightly delicate business. But now, with the benefit of time passed, when the dutiful official histories have become played out, like cracked records, a more nuanced, egalitarian and, indeed, speculative perspective is finally possible. PhD candidates are doubtless doggedl...