We continue our high-tech architecture series with a profile of Michael and Patty Hopkins, who designed one of the movement's most pragmatic buildings ? Hopkins House ? and went on to develop historicist high-tech architecture.
High-tech architecture, a style that emerged in the UK in the late 1960s and saw the expression of structural elements, had many contradictions.
It often merged structural rationally with exaggerated details or combined the bespoke with mass-produced societal solutions. However, it found some of its most paradoxical manifestations in the later work of Hopkins Architects, the creators of what some termed "historicist high-tech", or "high-tech brick and stone".
Hopkins Architects historicist high-tech buildings include Portcullis House Before creating the work that made them something of the misfits of the movement, Michael and Patty Hopkins (née Wainwright) followed a textbook British high-tech trajectory.
Both studied at London's Architectural Association, considered the birthplace of the style along with Regent Street Polytechnic, with tutors such as Cedric Price, Bob Maxwell and Peter Smithson and heavyweights of industrial design such as Buckminster Fuller and Charles and Ray Eames looming large.
Both, once they had graduated, spent time working in the offices of what was then Foster Associates (now Foster + Partners): Michael Hopkins as project architect on the Willis Building in Ipswich, and Patty Hopkins on the Pond Ho...