Anthony Hunt worked with architects Norman Foster, Richard Rogers, Michael and Patty Hopkins and Nicholas Grimshaw to engineer some of high-tech's greatest buildings. We continue our high-tech architecture series with a profile of the influential engineer.
High-tech architecture's pioneers had their stylistic differences, collaborations and contestations, but they can almost all be united by a single thread: the structural engineering practice Anthony Hunt Associates (AHA) and its founder Anthony ? better known as Tony ? Hunt, the "architect's engineer".
It was perhaps inevitable that modernism's preoccupation with technology would foster a dissolution of the boundaries between architecture and engineering, as figures such as the architect/engineer Owen Williams and designer Jean Prouvé demonstrated. Britain's high-tech style was borne of this lineage, but it also pushed these ideas much further.
Hunt also engineered later high-tech buildings like Waterloo Station. Photo is by Image by Jo Reid + John Peck
Within this context, AHA was one of what is often referred to as the big three engineering practices, along with Ove Arup & Partners and Buro Happold. AHA was by far the smallest, and this small size was matched with an incredibly open approach to new projects ? Hunt claims the firm never turned down an invitation to be involved in a competition entry.

Hunt was born in London in 1932, and in true high-tech fashion model airplanes (he claims to have designed...