Photograph: Alamy
If it had not been for Tony Hunt’s formidable skills as a structural engineer, the story of British architecture over the past half-century, from the refined elegance of the steel-and-glass temple that is Norman Foster’s Sainsbury Centre in Norwich to the huge biodomes of Nicholas Grimshaw’s Eden Project in Cornwall, might have taken a very different course.
Hunt, who has died aged 90, built them both, as well as the structures that started the careers of Foster and Richard and Su Rogers. When Terry Farrell and Grimshaw were still partners, Hunt was the engineer for their first major building, a London housing co-op in a tower near Regent’s Park.
