Author and historian Dr Alistair Fair charts the career of the late Sir Michael Hopkins.
The former Inland Revenue Centre, at Castle Meadow in Nottingham by Hopkins Architects (1993-95) – Grade II listed in June 2023.Â
Sir Michael Hopkins, widely recognised as one of the leading figures in British architecture during the last fifty years, has died at the age of 88. Hopkins made a significant, original contribution to the emergence and development of High Tech architecture – that is, an approach to design which celebrates the ‘honest’ expression of structure and servicing.
Michael Hopkins was born in 1935. After time working with Frederick Gibberd and Basil Spence, he studied at the Architectural Association, where he met his future professional partner and wife, Patty. His tutors included Oliver Hill and John Winter; the latter’s use of steel was to be an important influence. After graduating, Hopkins spent eight years at Foster Associates, working on projects including the IBM offices at Cosham (1971). He was project architect on the Willis Faber building in Ipswich (1975). With a gently curving skin of dark-tinted glass, Wills Faber was a defining work of High Tech.
In 1976, Michael and Patty Hopkins designed a house for themselves in Hampstead, north London. They adapted a construction system intended for non-domestic buildings, its lightweight steel frame and extensive glazing echoing some of the 1940s Californian case study houses. The house has a flexible layout that originally featured few fixed internal partitions. In its sparing use of materials and consideration of beneficial solar gain, it was also an efficient response to the energy crisis of the 1970s.
The Mound Stand at Lord’s Cricket Ground.
Michael and Patty Hopkins subsequently went into practice together. Key early projects include the Draught Beer Department for Greene King’s brewery at Bury St Edmunds (1979), a highly serviced building housing a range of industrial processes. The Patera building system (1981) was a standardised approach for more general application. Built quickly on a concrete slab, with specially designed structural and cladding systems, flexible enclosures of various sizes were possible.
Several 1980s projects took a more sculptural form, aided by the use of fabric canopies. Schlumberger’s Research Laboratories in Cambridge (1985) comprise a tented structure which rises out of two low-rise, steel-framed ranges. For social reasons, functions were gathered together, with the low-rise outer blocks containing the laboratories (facing in) and offices (facing out). The ‘tent’ houses the rigs as well as a café. It is uninsulated and unheated: the idea was that the membrane would reduce summer solar gain and winter heat loss. Teflon-coated glassfibre was used for the first time in Britain (though Hopkins had also proposed it for the semi-enclosure of Basildon’s main shopping precinct in 1982). This is not an easy material to work with, and its successful use reflects collaboration with the engineer, Tony Hunt, as well as the contractor.
At Lord’s cricket ground, the Mound Stand (1987) has a tented roof of woven polyester, which revisits the idea of the traditional village green marquee. At its base is a brick arcade, built in 1890 and carefully extended. It was to inspire Hopkins to take a new interest in brick. This traditional material would be treated, however, according to the High Tech principle of structural honesty: it would be load-bearing.
Top: The amenity building is the visual and social centre of the complex, containing a ground floor sports hall with a bar and restaurants above.
Below: Glass block stair towers at the building corners form part of the natural ventilation system, while external shading was provided on the triple-glazed windows by horizontal, projecting, glass ‘light shelves’ and a venetian blind in the outer cavity.
Several projects further reinvigorated High Tech in their combination of old and new. Bracken House in central London – built in the 1950s as the home of the Financial Times and first post-war listed building in England – was carefully reconfigured and extended (1992). A cutlery factory near Sheffield for David Mellor (1989) uses load-bearing stone to support a shallow-pitched roof. Glyndebourne Opera House (1994) added a substantial auditorium to an existing complex of buildings. There is a Kahn-like monumentality in the arcaded brick elevations and soaring lead-clad stage tower; the wood-lined auditorium, meanwhile, draws successfully on traditional theatre geometries.
At an urban scale, offices for the Inland Revenue in Nottingham (1995) created a campus of buildings with arcaded brick elevations which has recently (2023) been listed at Grade II, the sixth Hopkins project to be recognised by the designations system. Sustainability was increasingly a priority for the Hopkins practice, too, and the Nottingham design prioritised natural ventilation and daylighting. The same interests also shaped Portcullis House, Westminster (2000), the office building for Parliamentarians which sits above the Piranesian delights of the Jubilee line underground station, and whose elevations make no attempt to hide its ventilation ducts.
More recent projects by Hopkins’ office develop these ideas in new directions, from Norwich cathedral refectory (2009), where old and new once again sit side by side, to the Olympic velodrome in London (2012), which appears to represent speed and movement in frozen form.
Michael and Patty Hopkins were jointly awarded the RIBA Gold Medal in 1994. Michael Hopkins was also awarded a CBE and was knighted for Services to Architecture. He is survived by his wife Patty, his three children and eleven grandchildren.
Dr Alistair Fair is a Reader in Architectural History at the University of Edinburgh.Â
