Michael Hopkins, architect and co-founder of Hopkins Architects has died aged 88. Chair at Grimshaw Architects, Andrew Whalley, looks back on his life and career.
The Schlumberger Research Centre in Cambridge
In losing Michael Hopkins, British architecture has lost one of its most influential practitioners in recent memory. Born in 1935, Hopkins founded his practice, Michael Hopkins and Partners (later, Hopkins Architects) in 1976 with his wife Patty Hopkins.
Their first project, their family house in North London, launched the practice and set forth a distinct approach with its elegant, open plan within a glass and steel ‘crystal pavilion’. As with the Farnsworth House by Mies van der Rohe, its boundaries are defined by the landscape it looks out on. Although modest in scale, it became very quickly influential and launched a career that spanned six decades designing buildings across a multitude of scales and typologies. They all shared one core ingredient: a clear and legible driving concept.
Michael met Patty while studying at the Architectural Association in the early sixties. The ‘swinging sixties’ were undoubtedly a time to challenge convention. At that time, the heavy construction of British Brutalism ruled. Michael, however, was fueled by provocateurs such as Cedric Price and shared a stylistic imprint with contemporaries like Richard Rogers and Nicholas Grimshaw who would go on to have similarly successful, parallel professional trajectories. Michael maintained a close relationship with the AA, attending as a jury critic of students work (including my own) and serving as the school’s President in the late nineties.
The Hopkins House in Hampstead. Credit Steve Cadman / Wiki Commons
Further Hopkins projects shared the family home’s search for elegant, highly honed structure and benefitted from a close collaboration with the structural engineer, Anthony Hunt, who Michael had met during his time with Norman Foster overseeing the design of the Willis Faber Dumas building in Ipswich. The Patera modular building system employed was far ahead of its time and continued a reductive approach to structure. When paired with a similar approach to developing the envelope, this approach would form the basis of the design for the practice’s long term London studio north of Marylebone Station.
During the early eighties Michael shared an interest in structural exploration and technology alongside Rogers, Foster and Grimshaw — who were grouped by architecture critics as the ‘High-Tech Four’. Michael and Patty were driven by their search for lightweight structures, now incorporating fabrics, particularly PTFE, into buildings such as the Schlumberger Cambridge Research Center, with its flamboyant, externally rigged, fabric roof.
But their break with their contemporaries was the parallel exploration of incorporating traditional materials. These combinations were almost a contradiction: the load bearing, heavy masonry structures almost an anathema to their high-tech colleagues. The buildings continued to enjoy elegant steel structures and were now twinned with mass masonry and an added pragmatism, all of which is evident at the David Mellor Cutlery Factory: the round geometry of the factory being generated by reusing the original foundations of its predecessor, a gasometer.
The London 2012 Olympic Velodrome, now known as the Lee Valley VeloPark
This hybrid approach, a marriage of tradition and contemporary, was carried out with enormous success at the Mound Stand at Lord’s Cricket ground, a project that managed to please the traditionalists, with its renovated and newly built brick arched structure, as well as delight the modernists, with its gossamer light fabric roof. The project, completed in 1987, arguably opened the door for an institution, Lord’s, steeped in tradition, to embrace an ongoing series of contemporary architecture commissions which continues thirty years on.
Indeed, this successful combination echoing vernacular, contrasted with technology and contemporary design, would lead to more complex commissions from major institutions, such as Glyndebourne Opera House and the Inland Revenue Centre in Nottingham. The conversion of the old Financial Times printing works at Bracken House further engaged with a contemporary modular cast steel-framed facade that echoed the cast iron architecture of the nineteenth century. The combination of traditional materials and light weight structures continued there with glue-lam timber and fabric. This technique was first tested at small scale with the very elegant pavilion for the Buckingham Palace ticket office, continuing the commissions from revered institutions, then taken to larger scale and more complex buildings, most notably the timber and glass winter garden roof for the parliamentary offices at Portcullis House at Westminster.
This set a very distinctive trajectory for the practice’s work which continued to develop with more complex projects such as St Thomas Hospital and delightful entries like the Olympic Velodrome for London’s 2012 iteration of the Games. There is also an extensive portfolio of international opportunities in the USA and Middle East, most notably the UAE where they have established a very successful studio in Dubai. Most recently the Hopkins practice designed the cultural districts at the Dubai World Expo 2020, continuing the development of masonry construction and light weight structures. In this case a very economic modular precast concrete building system frame public plazas that in turn are shaded from the harsh sun with a filagree of perforated aluminum panels on very light weight tensile steel structures. The modularity delivered the buildings quickly for their temporary uses during the expo and their precast masonry construction instilled the sense of permanence that underpinned the ambitions for the entire site to become a new permanent city district for Dubai.
As a student I was inspired by the Hopkins house and the work of their practice, so of course it seemed natural if I was visiting London to write to them and ask if I could visit. It’s a testimony to their generosity that I was welcomed and taken around. At that time the office still occupied the top, street level half of the house. We would meet many times again, including professionally as we pursued the same commissions from the likes of Yale University (he was awarded Kroon Hall in the end) and others.
His work was displayed side-by-side with that of his high-tech peers in the Sainsbury Centre’s “SUPERSTRUCTURES: The New Architecture 1960-90” exhibition, noting its wider influence from that initial home to everything that has come after. The lasting legacy of Michael Hopkins goes beyond a remarkable portfolio of projects and furthers an approach to design that continues to be explored and developed by a new generation of principals at Hopkins Architects as his namesake practice continues its pursuit of excellence.
