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.
Michael Hopkins and his architectural partner and wife Patty 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.
He founded his own practice alongside his wife and fellow Architectural Association classmate Patty, shorty thereafter garnering major commissions for the Schlumberger Cambridge Research Centre, Westminster Underground Station, and Glyndebourne Opera on the heels of their successful open-plan design for the live-work Hopkins House, which the couple completed in Hampstead in 1976.
Hopkins' Schlumberger Research Centre, in Cambridge. Photograph courtesy of Hopkins Architects Limited.
Michael Hopkins and his architectural partner and wife Patty 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.
He founded his own practice alongside his wife and fellow Architectural Association classmate Patty, shorty thereafter garnering major commissions for the Schlumberger Cambridge Research Centre, Westminster Underground Station, and Glyndebourne Opera on the heels of their successful open-plan design for the live-work Hopkins House, which the couple completed in Hampstead in 1976.
“Michael will be sadly missed by all of us who were lucky enough to have worked with him. He was consistently rigorous in his thinking, brilliant in his analysis, and fearlessly creative in his design. To have worked with him on so many projects was an education like no other and an absolute privilege. With Michael, the process was always intensely focussed and the conversation that led to the buildings always began as a voyage of discovery typically centered on establishing a sense of place, 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. Nothing was ever taken for granted. He was greatly respected both as an architect and as a person of integrity and we will all miss him enormously”.
A further statement from Principals, Hopkins Architects
Hopkins will be remembered as someone whose work thoughtfully evoked artistic notions of the past while innovating in the use of lightweight materials that would become a precursor to the profession’s increasingly technical and sustainably-minded future.
