Sir Michael and Lady Hopkins, principals and founding partners of the London-based architectural practice Hopkins Architects Ltd., established in 1976, are responsible for some of the most spectacular and influential buildings from the British High-Tech movement of the late 20th century. Their work is characterized by its materiality and attention to detail, from the early buildings in steel and glass to the later contextual projects using traditional materials, such as brick, stone, and lead. Coupled with a boldness and simplicity of form, this flexibility allows a constructional economy of repetitive systems—enriched in recent years as the scale and complexity of the Hopkins' work has steadily increased.
The practice built its early reputation on a series of industrial commissions, mainly for stand-alone buildings on green-field sites, such as the Greene King Beer Warehouse (Manchester, England, 1980) and the Schlumberger Cambridge Research Centre (Cambridge, England, 1985), both of which clearly express function through the dramatic display of technology. The Patera Building System (1982), a factory-produced kit of parts for light-industrial buildings, also shares with Schlumberger the use of an external, or exoskeletal, structure. One of the prototypes of this system was eventually recycled for use as the Hopkins offices in north London. The Schlumberger building included a Teflon-coated fabric roof structure, the first of what has since become a trademark element in Hopkins' architecture, appearing in a series of more recent public projects, such as the Mound Stand (1991) at Lord's Cricket Ground in London, the temporary ticket office (1994) for Buckingham Palace, and the Dynamic Earth exhibition building (1999) in Edinburgh.
The shift toward a contextual and site-responsive approach, marked by the Mound Stand, resulted in a series of projects in sensitive surroundings, including Bracken House (1992) near St. Paul's Cathedral in London; Glyndebourne Opera House (1994), built on the grounds of a Sussex country house; and, more recently, Portcullis House (2000), providing new government offices adjacent to the Westminster Houses of Parliament. The latter building also manifests a concern with energy efficiency and environmental issues; these were first explored in two earlier projects, both for institutional clients: the Inland Revenue Headquarters (1994) in Nottingham, which again included a fabric roof structure, and the Jubilee Campus (1999) for the University of Nottingham. Other major projects under way at the time of writing include several cultural buildings funded by the Millennium Lottery Commission, such as the Norfolk and Norwich Library (1996–2001) and the Manchester City Art Gallery (1994–2001).
Michael Hopkins is the son of a builder from Dorset, and his early architectural experience is marked by a fascination with construction. Beginning with small-scale building projects undertaken as a child to the restoration with Patty Hopkins of a 400-year-old house in Suffolk, this interest also led to his dropping out of art school at an early stage in favor of practical experience in an architect's office. After working as an assistant to Frederick Gibberd and then Sir Basil Spence, he returned to study at the Architectural Association (AA) in London and there encountered an influential group of young designers and architectural theorists. Chief among these were Cedric Price and Peter Smithson, both now seen as exerting a significant early influence on the development of high-tech architecture in Britain. Four years after Michael, in 1967, Patty also completed her studies at the AA, with a thesis project inspired by the Charles and Ray Eames House (1949) in California and its use of factory-produced components. In 1968, they were offered a commission by Hopkins' father, then a director of a national construction company, and for this they teamed up with the young Norman Foster (who they had also met at the AA) and his practice Team 4, which also included Richard Rogers. Although this first project fell through, they worked on another of Foster's groundbreaking buildings, the Willis Faber Dumas offices (1975), a cantilevered concrete structure with a frameless full-height glass curtain wall. The minimalism of the Foster buildings and the domestic scale of the Eames House came together in the Hopkins' own family house (1976) built in north London—the firm's inaugural project. This two-story steel-and-glass pavilion also became an icon for the burgeoning High-Tech movement; with its lightweight lattice roof trusses, corrugated-metal side walls, full-height sliding windows, and metallic venetian blinds, it contained most of the basic ingredients of the practice's early larger projects, particularly the Green King Warehouse as well as the offices at Schlumberger and the later Solid State Logic (1988).
In the Hopkins' later work, these materials were augmented according to context, particularly where existing buildings are involved, as a contrast is created with materials that heighten the distinction between old and new. For instance, at the Mound Stand an existing brick arcade is dramatically offset by the new white fabric canopies cantilevered out above the street. At the Bracken House office building, the monumental brick wings of the old printing works frame a delicate assembly of bronze-and-glass bay windows that screen the newly inserted structure.
This rediscovery of traditional materials through the adaptation to historic contexts has also found another function in the practice's later experiments in ecologically oriented, or "green architecture." The property of thermal mass that is missing in many lightweight high-tech buildings has been exploited for environmental comfort and to help improve energy efficiency. At the Inland Revenue headquarters, this was used to help ventilate the buildings naturally, together with glass stair towers to generate air movement and exposed-concrete ceilings to absorb heat. More successful from an environmental point of view has been the Nottingham University Jubilee Campus, where a combination of natural and mechanical ventilation provides substantial energy savings. The expressive rotating wind towers and photovoltaic solar panel arrays, together with the cedar-clad elevations and grass-covered roofs, have also proved influential in dramatizing ecological factors in architecture. This new direction in the practice's work is also visible at Portcullis House but is less successful from a compositional viewpoint, perhaps because of the constraints of fitting in with some rather undistinguished neighboring buildings.
The Hopkins practice has received numerous awards, including the Royal Gold Medal from the Royal Institute of British Architects (1994). In 1995, Michael received a knighthood in recognition of his contribution to architecture. A modest and practical couple with a clear focus on creating enduring buildings rather than the transient realm of theoretical debate, they have inspired many of their collaborators to embark on similar ventures of their own.
JONATHAN A. HALE
Sennott R.S. Encyclopedia of twentieth century architecture, Vol.2 (G-O). Fitzroy Dearborn., 2005.
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