During his early career, Michael Hopkins worked in partnership for eight years with Norman Foster, from about 1969 to 1975. The two met right after the Team 4 partnership of Norman and Wendy Foster plus Richard and Su Rogers had broken up. Initially, Foster and Hopkins worked on a project Hopkins brought in for the planning of an industrial complex in Yorkshire. The two worked together on Foster’s project for IBM in Cosham and incorporated ideas they shared based on the Eames House and the Californian School Construction System. They worked with component catalogs and dry construction techniques. After the Willis Faber Dumas Insurance Headquarters (see case study #7) project in Ipswich, however, Hopkins had enough ideas and business contacts to develop in partnership with his wife, Patty. Michael Hopkins & Partners was formed in 1976 with five founding partners: Michael Hopkins, Patty Hopkins, John Pringle, Ian Sharratt, and Bill Taylor. Their first project seems to have been a London office for Willis Faber Dumas in Trinity Square. The Hopkins residence, an Eames-like manifesto, was built in London in 1976, and in 1984 the firm built its offices in the Marylebone section of London, just west of Regents Park.
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Figure 5.17 Bin data distribution for Cambridge, United Kingdom. Concentric areas of graph indicate the number of hours per year that weather conditions normally occur in this climate. Similar to elevation readings on topographic maps, highest frequency occurrences of weather are at the center peaks of the graph. (Data sources: Engineering Weather Data, typical meteorological year (TMY) data from the National Climatic Data Center, and the ASHRAE Weather Data Viewer from the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers.) |
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The work of Michael Hopkins & Partners is known for its pragmatic directness, lightweight structure, and Miesian detail. Hopkins calls himself “an engineering architect.” The firm’s subjective notions have shown a fondness for Frei Otto, Buckminster Fuller, Paxton’s Crystal Palace, the Eames House (see case studies #14 and #18) and the tension between nature and artifice. The association with Frei Otto makes for a particularly interesting set of connections. Hopkins has had a long association with engineers Buro Happold, which was founded by Ted Happold, formerly of Arup & Partners. Happold in turn is a collaborator and friend of Frei Otto. Buro Happold and Otto jointly received the 1996 Aga Khan Award for Architecture in recognition of their joint venture project at Tuwaiq Palace, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, completed in 1985. Ted Happold is, coincidentally, the Arup contact who involved Piano + Rogers in the Centre Pompidou competition of 1971 (see case study #22).
Much of Hopkins’s early work was greenfield, rural, and devoted to technical exploration. More recent projects have addressed urban environments and adapted more to context. At this writing, all of the firm’s work has been in the United Kingdom.
The large clear-span space for unobstructed operation of the 10 ton gantry crane seems to have fueled Hopkins’s determination to cover the space with an externally stressed fabric skin. Likewise, the programmatic requirement for close communication between Test Station and laboratories provoked the decision to cluster all four elements of the complex into one building: testing, laboratories, offices, and recreation.