The architect Sir Michael Hopkins, who has died aged 88, occupied a special place in a much abused profession. The best known Hopkins buildings – the Mound stand at Lord’s cricket ground, Glyndebourne opera house, Westminster underground station, the 2012 Olympic velodrome – command not only respect but positive affection. Hopkins gave modern architecture a human face.
At the start of his career, he seemed inextricably linked to the young turks of high tech, Richard Rogers and Norman Foster, designing steel-frame buildings of immaculate precision. From the late 1960s, Hopkins spent eight productive years in partnership with Foster. The Willis Faber and Dumas headquarters in Ipswich, Suffolk, was the peak of their collaboration. But his later architecture took a different and more original direction as he became more concerned with the history of building and the place of architecture in the landscape. This growing sense of context brought his buildings a new richness, a poetic modernity rooted in his understanding of the past.
He could play the international game as well as anyone. There are fine Hopkins buildings in the US and Tokyo, India and Dubai. But Hopkins remained a quintessentially British architect. He liked to tell of how he once arrived for a job interview in Suffolk and realised he was still wearing his jeans. He went to a men’s outfitters in Bury St Edmunds and bought himself some cavalry twill trousers, a check shirt and a tweed jacket. As an afterthought he added a tie. Also up for the job was Rogers, wearing his usual continental-style blouson. The board of directors making the decision easily identified a kindred spirit: Hopkins got the job.
It is a good story, showing how easily Hopkins’s clients managed to relate to him, often forming lasting friendships. He was a big ruminative man of strong affections who, as time went on, became more deeply rooted in the rural landscapes that he made his own.
Michael was born in Poole, Dorset, the son of Barbara and Gerald Hopkins. His father ran his own contract building firm in Bournemouth. Michael was sent to Sherborne, a public school in a town dominated by a wonderful medieval abbey. He escaped from games and lessons to take bike rides through the countryside, absorbing the lie of the land and the detail of the buildings. Early on, there had been a family decision that Michael would become an architect.
He was 23 when he arrived at the Architectural Association in London, a mature student in a black leather jacket with an Angry Young Man manner. He seemed to be super-confident, having already studied architecture at Bournemouth School of Art and worked professionally with both Frederick Gibberd, designer of Harlow New Town, and Basil Spence.
The AA in the early 60s was a lively, inspiring place to be. The curriculum was set by Peter Smithson, a key figure in the postwar “new brutalism”; Cedric Price, who developed the Fun Palace with the theatre director Joan Littlewood, was teaching there. Architectural history was high on the agenda and Hopkins was introduced to the Victorian functional tradition, the dramatic architecture of railway buildings, industrial warehouses and factories that was to be such an influence on him.
At the AA, most importantly of all, he met Patricia Wainwright, a fellow student, who was to become both his wife (in 1962) and working partner in a lastingly successful creative collaboration, in which Michael’s streak of professional cussedness was balanced by Patty’s diplomacy and charm.
Throughout his working life, Michael’s professional and family lives were intertwined. While they were still students, he and Patty embarked on the restoration of a timber-frame house in Suffolk. In order to repair it Michael needed to know precisely how it had been put together in the first place, and unbolted the components like those of a 15th-century Meccano set. Suddenly, “like a flash out of the blue”, he understood the strong connection between the way that buildings were constructed and the way they eventually looked.
Later on, in 1976, once Michael had left Foster and the Hopkins partnership had been established, he and Patty designed the rigorously beautiful steel and glass building that made them immediately famous. The Hopkins House on Downshire Hill in Hampstead, north London, was designed as both a family home and an architectural office, using factory-made industrial components in an urban, elegant and very English way.
From the Hopkins House developed a whole progeny of structurally radical buildings: Greene King’s draught beer cellars in Bury St Edmunds; the Schlumberger Research Centre in Cambridge; Solid State Logic headquarters at Begbroke in Oxfordshire. All these are emphatically modernist in concept, “kits-of-parts” buildings engineered with Michael’s customary vigour. But one catches shadows of Paxton’s Victorian Crystal Palace structures too.
By the early 80s, Hopkins seemed well on track to be another of the British “superstarchitects”. His office was expanding. The practice now included John Pringle and Chris Wilkinson, both destined to be leading British architects. But Hopkins was about to take a different direction: the Mound stand at Lord’s became his turning point.
This mid-80s commission for a new building involving the reconstruction of Frank Verity’s original 1890s stand shows Hopkins no longer in assertively high tech architectural mode but engaging sensitively with context and atmosphere. One commentator saw the new stand as “expressing the sense of an English summer’s day in brick, steel, glass and tensile fabric”. Hopkins was at the start of inventing a new language for late 20th-century British modernism.
Hopkins himself was later to express this as his personal “reconciliation with history”. He was becoming more conscious of his links with the architecture of the past, with the great industrial buildings of the 19th century, and with natural materials such as stone, wood and brick.
When he came to design a new cutlery factory in Derbyshire for my husband, David Mellor, on the site of a redundant village gasworks, it was Hopkins who suggested using the original circular foundation of the gas cylinder as a basis for the factory, a poetic but also wholly practical example of a new building arising from the old.
Hopkins triumphed at this period with his design for the new opera house at Glyndebourne, a job for which he beat off competition from James Stirling. Hopkins needed to reconcile the bucolic appeal of the Christie family’s neo-Elizabethan house and splendid gardens with the commercial and technical demands of a sophisticated modern opera house. Most people agree that the pitch pine interior of Hopkins’s auditorium, as well as the wonderful acoustic, gives Glyndebourne a magic of its own.
By the early 90s, Hopkins’s success in relating historic context and new technology was gaining him admirers. He was appointed to the Royal Fine Art Commission. In 1992 he was elected a Royal Academician. In 1994 he and Patty were jointly awarded the Riba gold medal, a prize which recognised the interdependence of their skills. Michael was knighted in 1995.
The Hopkins partnership was given a bumpy ride with its designs for Portcullis House. This complex building, containing committee rooms and offices for more than 200 MPs, was begun in 1989 and completed in 2000. An almost automatic resistance to the building arose from its bulky incursion on to one of the world’s most sensitive sites, just off the Victoria Embankment, with Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament alongside. Objections receded once the building had weathered.
There were no such reservations about Westminster underground station, the subterranean structure under Portcullis House. This is Hopkins high tech at its most dramatic, and a triumph of civil engineering. The sublime interior of the cavernous underground interchange has often been described as Piranesian. It was also a location for the 2007 film of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.
The Hopkins family believed in pleasure, and some of the most endearing Hopkins buildings were public pleasure palaces: the Inn on the Park café on the lakeside of St James’s Park in London; the Garden Pavilion at Alnwick in Northumberland; the refectory building at Norwich Cathedral with its spectacular timber and steel roof structure. These are buildings that lift the spirit in the subtlety with which they relate to the history of place. Hopkins’s trademark membrane structure canopies, as in the spectator stands at Goodwood racecourse in West Sussex, are faintly reminiscent of the splendour of the medieval tournament.
Michael had many connections with the medical profession. His brother was a doctor, as were both of Patty’s parents. And in the early years of the new century, the practice began working on its first large-scale hospital project, the Evelina children’s hospital on the St Thomas’ hospital site near Waterloo station. This sophisticated yet cheerful building has been much acclaimed. Hopkins’s ambulatory cancer care centre for University College London is designed to provide a reassuring ambience for 125,000 outpatients a year.
The Hopkins practice was now employing around 200 architects. They were carrying out important commissions in America, including university buildings for Yale and Princeton. A particular thrill was the designing of a huge cricket stadium in the wonderful landscape of the Deccan plateau, south-east of Mumbai. Hopkins was now operating internationally, and in 2004 opened an office in Dubai. Michael and Patty latterly began to share out responsibility, giving a group of senior partners shares in Hopkins Architects.
In 1987 Michael and Patty had purchased a site on the hills above Borgo a Mozzano, north of Lucca. The 350-acre Catureglio estate centred round a traditional square stone building in traditional local style, with its own chapel and numerous abandoned outbuildings around. For Michael, Catureglio became a personal project as he restored the buildings, revived the vineyards and olive groves and cleared the forestry around.
Eight years later, the Hopkinses took on another architectural challenge, Blackheath House near Aldeburgh, Suffolk, an internally ungainly Victorian house which had been re-clad in brick by the neo-Georgian architect Raymond Erith. The irresistible attraction for Michael, a keen sailor, was the vista across the Alde estuary towards Orford. This house too, set in 500 acres, was gradually given the Hopkins treatment.
Both in Italy and Suffolk, he and Patty created not only two fine architectural landscapes but a whole way of living that embraced their many friends – architects and artists, writers and musicians – over several generations. They were endlessly hospitable and in Suffolk their ties to the Aldeburgh festival were strong.
Michael is survived by Patty and their three children, Sarah, Abi and Joel, and 11 grandchildren.
• Michael John Hopkins, architect, born 7 May 1935; died 17 June 2023
• Fiona MacCarthy died in 2020
