Sir Michael Hopkins, one of the leading British architects of his era, has died leaving behind a built legacy including Portcullis House at the Palace of Westminster, the Mound Stand at Lord’s cricket ground and the Jubilee campus at Nottingham University.
His wife, Patty Hopkins, with whom he formed Hopkins Architects in 1976, said he had “died peacefully at the age of 88, surrounded by his family”.
Alongside Richard Rogers, who died last December, Norman Foster and Nicholas Grimshaw, Hopkins became part of a vanguard of “hi-tech” London-based architects who from the 1980s and into the 2000s dominated building design in Britain and beyond.
He and Lady Hopkins won the Royal Gold Medal for architecture in 1994, he was elected a Royal Academician in 1992 and knighted for services to architecture in 1995.
Michael Taylor, the current principal of Hopkins Architects, described Hopkins as “brilliant in his analysis and fearlessly creative in his designing”.
He said Hopkins approached building design by first “establishing a sense of place, about how to make historic connections, how to put the materials together in an honest and contemporary way so that the building would appear calm and make immediate sense to the end user”.
Lady Hopkins said: “Michael was obsessive about architecture and tenacious in refining a design until he was absolutely satisfied with it. He was usually (and annoyingly) right. He made the world – and the buildings so many people live, work and learn in – more beautiful. We will miss him more than we can imagine.”
The couple first met at the Architectural Association, a school for architecture in London, and started their partnership in the 70s with commissions including their own house in Hampstead, a glass and steel structure that quickly became a case study of the pared-backed aesthetic of the hi-tech movement. It was also the family home, where the couple brought up their three children. It was open plan, but when the children became teenagers they demanded their bedrooms get walls.
By the 1980s they discovered brick, after being asked to rebuild the Mound Stand for Marylebone Cricket Club, which included Victorian brick arches. They went on to use the material for a new opera house at Glyndebourne and used stone amply at Portcullis House. Meanwhile, Rogers and Foster, who had worked with Hopkins on the celebrated Willis Faber and Dumas building at Ipswich, pressed on with steel and glass.
When lottery money for public architectural commissions started to flow around the turn of the millennium, Hopkins Architects built the Forum, a new covered public space in Norwich.
The commission for Portcullis House led them into one of the most controversial building projects of its era. The soaring £235m cost for the MPs offices, which opened in 2001, grabbed public attention. Hundreds of thousands of pounds were spent on indoor fig trees, recently felled. The Guardian’s critic at the time of opening complained its robust appearance meant it “looks across to the Palace of Westminster like a podgy, old-time pugilist might, squaring up to its well-mannered Victorian partner and sniffing: ‘Come on then, wanna fight?’”
But the building has become increasingly well-loved, with a huge atrium where MPs mingle with lobbyists over coffee and lunch, and handsome committee rooms where everyone from Rupert Murdoch to Boris Johnson has been grilled.
The concrete cathedral of Westminster tube station below was also designed by Hopkins Architects, as part of the architecturally ambitious Jubilee line extension, with architects such as Will Alsop, Foster, Ian Ritchie and Richard MacCormac picked to design distinctive stations as the line headed east towards Canary Wharf.
The Hopkins partnership was also known for 1985’s Schlumberger Cambridge Research Centre with a tent-like roof that would be echoed at Lord’s, the Guy’s and St Thomas’ Evelina Children’s hospital, which opened in 2005 and was a rare example of a new NHS building at that time that was not built under the private finance initiative that was known for sidelining the contribution of architects.
Hopkins was born in 1935 in Poole, Dorset, to a builder father and a mother who decided when he was 12 that he would be an architect. He is survived by his wife, three children and 11 grandchildren. His family said that in his final years he had lived with vascular dementia.
