Archinect - News

High-Tech pioneer and Hopkins Architects founder Michael Hopkins passes away aged 88

2023-06-20T15:30:00-04:00

One of the most notable contributors to the development of contemporary British architecture is being mourned after acclaimed Hopkins Architects co-founder Sir Michael Hopkins passed away last week at the age of 88.

A pioneer of the High-Tech movement, Hopkins was considered one of the most successful building designers in post-1970s England thanks to key projects such as 2001’s Portcullis House and the 1987 Mound Stand at Lord’s Cricket Ground that displayed a unique sensitivity towards historical context while helping to propel his generation of architects to widespread critical acceptance.

Hopkins' Schlumberger Research Centre, in Cambridge. Image courtesy Flickr user Valerian Guillot (CC BY-NC 2.0)

Joining with contemporaries Richard Rogers and Norman Foster, Hopkins broke conventions in almost every typology he worked with in order to establish the style against both the then-current and ages-old material heritage of the country that he would eventually come to reference in a si...

Don't expect much from King Charles' reign architecturally, these two of his constituent critics say

2022-09-26T12:25:00-04:00

Poundbury, Paisley and Perspectives all ultimately failed to conquer the complex commercial and political challenges they faced. Their royal patron’s attempts to create human-centred townscapes have led to car-dominated suburbs. His efforts to uplift grand historic buildings have carved them into dreary flats. Our King is someone who sees the right problems but, ensconced in the very establishment that prevents meaningful solutions, he can only meddle around the edges of effecting real change.

The new British King is memorably the originator of the panned Poundbury estate that has failed to fall in line with its stated goals towards sustainability and car-free pedestrian orientation, according to Phineas Harper. He thinks the scion is hemmed in by a stolid commercial banking system and arcane land ownership laws and that class differences have otherwise made Charles' ability to gain perspective on the needs of his constituents otherwise impossible. As the Open City director sees it: “His view of society, as of architecture, is restricted to what can be seen from the tinted window of a chauffeured car.”

Previously on Archinect: Richard Rogers challenges Prince Charles to public debate over built environment

Meanwhile, in a different corner of the empire, new ArchitectureAU monthly critic Elizabeth Farrelly says she felt he “proved himself thoroughly unrepentant” during his time as Prince, citing his statements in support of traditionalism, and asking, “is he, as a constitut...

dRMM’s Stirling Prize-winning, revamped Hastings Pier is already for sale

2018-02-21T17:47:00-05:00

Property firm GVA said it was open to offers after being asked to find a buyer for the transformed Sussex coastal landmark. The charity behind dRMM’s much-loved refurbishment of the pier went into administration last year. Now the administrators have appointed GVA to sell the asset.

The charity responsible for restoring and running Hastings Pier—the once derelict landmark whose £14.2 million rebuild won this year's RIBA Stirling Prize—has been forced to put the property up for sell after experiencing some financial difficulties. According to the Architects' Journal, last year, the charity failed to agree a new three-year business plan with the Heritage Lottery Fund, Hastings Borough Council and East Sussex County Council in order to become self-funding.

Due to the charity's insolvency, administrators Smith & Williamson were appointed back in November in hopes of ensuring the pier's future. They have now put the property firm GVA in charge of selling the 145-year old pier, which will remain open throughout 2018 with funds from HLF already allocated to the project.

The Invention of Wessex: Thomas Hardy as Architect

2018-02-13T14:08:00-05:00

There is a good case for listing Thomas Hardy amongst the greatest of all conceptual architects — the prophet, well before the fact, of a particular type of speculative, imaginary architectural project which would boom a century later.

The 19th-century author Thomas Hardy has never been considered much of an architect. Yet as Kester Rattenbury shows, his creation of Wessex was an architectural project - one that drew on the ideas of his time, but also predicted some of the most inventive architectural work of our own age. Hardy saw rural England through an experimental, modern frame, and his Wessex Project was as radical in its time as Learning from Las Vegas and Delirious New York were in theirs.

London buildings are not what they used to be

2017-10-04T15:33:00-04:00

Today, London’s civic spaces are the byproduct of commercial development, the results of promises made by developers to create public amenity as a condition of planning consent. Ironically, Paris, which once imported its radical architecture from London in the form of the Pompidou Centre, now has a much more visionary approach to building, (...) it is much more of a nexus for interesting architecture.

London's contemporary architecture seems to have lost the radical qualities of British Architecture of the 1960s and 1970s.