Arts & Culture
English heritage
Published 18 October 1999
Design - Hugh Aldersey-Williams on the architect of parliament's new offices
It is an eclectic but in its way definitive list of national institutions: Lord's cricket ground, Glyndebourne opera house, the Financial Times, Cambridge colleges, the Inland Revenue and parliament itself. They are all the clients of one man, Sir Michael Hopkins, a modern architect in search of roots.
The tarpaulins came off Hopkins's new offices for MPs on Westminster Bridge opposite Big Ben during the summer. Although it will be some time before the building's complex innards - an atrium leading down to a remodelled Westminster Underground station - are finished, its shape is now clear. So too is its message. It is the architect's most conserv-ative building to date.
Hopkins worked with Norman Foster on the glass amoeba of the Willis Faber insurance offices in Ipswich before going into practice for himself. Now listed, Willis Faber is a radically modernist building that shouts its enthusiasm for new technologies and construction materials. Meanwhile, Michael and Patty Hopkins, his wife and business partner, quickly achieved the impossible, building their own house in Hampstead according to these precepts in 1976. The building is a two-storey corrugated metal box with fully glazed front and back walls. Influenced by houses that Charles and Ray Eames and other architects built for themselves during the 1950s in California, it does not fit in so much as disappear in its modesty on a street of Regency villas.
The house became a landmark in the British hi-tech movement which adapted the American idea that you could build houses industrially simply by ordering the parts from catalogues. In Britain there were no catalogues, so the parts were custom-designed and made to order, taking advantage of industrial and craft skills not generally exploited in the construction business. Foster and his former partner Richard Rogers have continued to mine the seam.
The turning point for Hopkins seems to have come in the late 1980s. Up until then, buildings such as those for Solid State Logic, near Oxford, and Schlumberger, near Cambridge, had an explicitly pioneering modernist programme, in tune with their occupants' businesses. There was even an unrealised proposal to cover the square conceived as the centre of Basildon New Town with a novel fabric roof in order to make the place more simpatico (the same proposal today would doubtless promise the Barcelona of Essex). Hopkins later used fabric structures on many buildings.
In 1988, Hopkins designed a cutlery factory for David Mellor in the Peak District National Park. It is circular, resting upon the foundations of a former gas-holder, and uses local stone and has a lead roof. The conversion of the Financial Times's Bracken House, a 1950s architectural curiosity just south of St Paul's Cathedral that was "listed" during the project, led Hopkins to a deepened respect for traditional building methods such as using the walls to support the load of the building (on many modern buildings the walls, whether "curtain" or not, hang from a more or less visible steel frame). The Mound Stand at Lord's and Glyndebourne took the idea further.
It is hard to unravel cause and effect here. Hopkins has attracted prominent institutions as clients; he has modified his style; he has moved from mainly rural to urban projects where the context of other buildings matters all at once. It is useless to look to Hopkins himself for answers.
He is not a philosopher but calls himself a problem-solver and an "engineering architect". But at a time when there is confusion about English identity, Hopkins seems to be attempting to solve the cultural problem for architecture. The English mud is sticking to his boots.
"Seems", because there is no manifesto to go by, just the catalogue of work. Yet consider the facts. He has done no significant work outside Britain. Indeed, until the opening of the Dynamic Earth centre in Edinburgh earlier this year he had not built beyond English borders. He thinks perhaps he is bad at the politicking or just unlucky in competitions. "It's bloody hard work being an architect," he bursts out finally.
This parochialism is surprising in these days of celebrity architects. Hopkins could compete on the international museum circuit along with Gehry, Piano, Meier and his old boss Foster. It would be interesting to see what he might do abroad. Off to pitch for a job in Saudi Arabia, he talks of using terracotta and mud in new structural ways.
Even without this evidence, there is a very English pragmatism in his talk of architecture as problem-solving. There is cultural resonance, too, but only, it seems, when it can be given a technological justification. Thus the use of fabric roofs at Lord's is as much about connecting with the tradition of village-green cricket and marquees as it is a cele-bration of the possibilities of new building technologies.
One can get in a terrible muddle with stylistic labels. Critics have tried to classify hi-tech architecture as classical (Foster's clean lines and repetitiveness) or gothic (Rogers's expressiveness). For much of his career, Hopkins has been in the classical camp, yet his credo of truth to materials places him close to the gothic so admired by William Morris and Pugin.
And so back to Westminster. A new parliament building has obvious cause to look British and now, with the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly, English, too. Maybe Hopkins's building does. It also has compromise written all over it. The exterior echoes both Pugin upstream and Norman Shaw down. The famously expensive bronze panelling has been selected to match neighbouring roofs. The chimneystacks of those roofs find their parallel in the massive cylindrical ventilation shafts that vent hot air from the environment-friendly structure, the air having first been funnelled up the sides of the building in ducts that grow larger floor by floor at the same rate as the stone piers alongside grow smaller. There is Gothic truth here as well as an echo of the vertical lines of the Houses of Parliament. But one suspects, perhaps for the first time in Hopkins's architecture, that the functional justification for these features came along after the decision to keep the visual form. (Similar Hopkins schemes for the city blocks that include Tottenham Court Road and Victoria Underground stations, but which do not have such a weight of history pressing in on them, forgo these egregious adornments.)
"I am trying," Hopkins has said, "to evolve a grammar of modern architecture where one can use a range of materials and arrive at a way of detailing them that is contemporary. In particular, I am interested in developing a new language for traditional materials." But why the interest in traditional materials after all the early experiments with fabric structures and other innovations if not to connect with the regional culture? Hopkins's undeclared goal is the creation of an architecture that is both modern and English.
In 1869, Thomas Huxley, the man who popularised Darwin's theories, struggled to find a "third way" between fundamentalist Christian belief, which was clearly incompatible with the new ideas of evolution, and atheism, which was too barren to contemplate. He thought he found one and invented the word "agnostic" to describe it. Whereas Huxley came from the comfort of conventional belief to be confronted with the godless truth, Hopkins began as a radical and has come to see the desirability of accommodation with tradition. But the determination to build a synthesis out of conflict is shared. Huxley's actions won him friends and influence.
It's done the same for Hopkins. His friends - unusually among architects, he has no real enemies, famously being the one modernist to have the blessing of the Prince of Wales - have billed his parliament building as his date with history. Friendly critics have glossed its messy blend of new and old, calling it pragmatic. But, as with Huxley, there is about Hopkins's architectural odyssey a niggling dissatisfaction at the failure to choose - the simply not knowing implied in the word agnostic - which way to go.
Post this article to
We want to encourage people to comment on our content and to exchange views with other readers and hope this will be done on a courteous basis. However, if you encounter posts which are offensive please let us know by using the 'report this comment' facility or by emailing comments@newstatesman.co.uk and we will take swift action where necessary.
