Co-founder of engineering practice Whitby Wood, Mark Whitby looks back on what it was like to work with the late Michael Hopkins as the practice was growing.
The Forum in Norwich was completed in 2001. (Credit Hopkins Architects)
Michael was an architect whose life was rooted in technology but whose spectrum evolved to take on the challenge of using craft materials, such as lead, stone, brick, precast concrete and timber in combination with the steel and glass that were the palette of High Tech. These became the hallmark of Michael’s architecture which while modern, was (and is still) contextual, honest and enduring.
Michael was a mature student when he joined the Architectural Association aged 23 having already studied at Bournemouth and worked with Basil Spence and Frederick Gibberd. At the AA he met Patty – his wife and lifelong collaborator – who on graduating, left to set up her own practice while Michael joined Norman Foster. Working with Foster they won a competition for the Willis building in Ipswich, which Michael led, setting a new standard for open plan collaborative workspace. Leaving in 1976, he joined Patty and they set up Hopkins Architects in their iconic glass and steel home in Hampstead, which Tony Hunt had engineered and they had built themselves.
Here, working initially for Tony Hunt, I was to collaborate on a number of buildings where I was able to witness the Hopkins’ practice soft departure from High Tech. From the outset, design was rooted in the tectonics of knitting materials together but initially practical suggestion to use materials, such as using blockwork for a loading bay, were to be greeted with suggestions that we ‘knew little about architecture’. Our highlight was the Patera building system which Michael, John Pringle and I evolved with the client Nigel Dale. A moderate success, one still stands at Hopkin’s office, with another in Docklands, that has been moved four times, being dismantled ’for refurbishment’ only last year.
Hopkins went on to win the Schlumberger research facility in Cambridge which exploited some of the Patera technology that had been pioneered, and we were to collaborate again on the David Mellor factory in Hathersage. Built on the site of a gasholder, we reused the foundations, extending them slightly and building a circular, loadbearing stone wall on which the steel roof structure would sit. The wall was essentially brittle and the roof ductile – and the joy was in how we resolved the building’s details, but more notable from Hopkins’ point of view was their development of a prefabricated panellised lead roof.
Bracken House in London. Credit: (Katie Chan / Wiki Commons)
Simultaneously, Hopkins were shortlisted for the Bracken House competition. Here, when Michael realised all the other competitors were working with Arup, asked us [Whitby Wood] to be their engineer. Taking an image of the Oriel Chambers in Liverpool, Michael and John challenged us to reinterpret what they believed was a load bearing steel façade. (I was to later discover the loadbearing steel is in the courtyard). Winning was a breakthrough for Hopkins and we continued with the design, only losing out to Arup when the Financial Times sold the site to the Japanese developer Obayashi. Our concept was to have a cast iron façade substituted with bronze and red sandstone, and Hopkins extended that palette even further. Elements from this later re-emerged in the design of Portcullis House, where, taking cue from the Old Bailey, the services are routed from the rooftop plant rooms into the floors via the façade.
As engineers, working with the Hopkins’ was always challenging, often demanding one to accept ‘one’s place’, which was never easy. This came to a climax when I was asked by the Architectural Review to write a review for the of Glyndebourne in which I questioned the structural logic of a detail. This wasn’t at all appreciated.
As a result the practice only worked with Michael once more on the Forum in Norwich where I had a back seat. Here Mike Crane, my fellow director, recalls how, with the contractor pressing for design information, Michael came up with a fresh design. When Mike made the point that we had just issued construction drawings, Michael simply replied ‘the building will be here a lot longer than you’.
The client paid our additional fees.
Source: Architecture Today