Repatriating innovation: Hopkins Architects lead by example with four new university projects

Architectural Review, The, April, 2008 by Rob Gregory

Within the UK, Hopkins' work is familiar to many. What is less well known, however, is how over recent years the practice has extended its reach across the world. Establishing the firm with wife Patty in 1976, founding partner Michael Hopkins led the practice to pioneer a specific English strain of High-Tech. Following this came a period when Michael Hopkins & Partners acquired an inaccurate reputation for only being interested in top-end high-budget work, following a series of prestigious commissions for venerable British establishment clients such as Buckingham Palace, Central Government and the Royal Academy. This era has now passed, however, and a renamed and restructured Hopkins Architects now has a more diverse team of home-grown co-directors who are attracting a broader range of clients.

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The first significant step change came with the architect's Jubilee Campus at Nottingham University (AR February 2000), where on a tight budget, working with timber cladding and galvanised steel, the practice reasserted itself as true architectural pioneer and English eccentric, with a curious building that has echoes of Schlumberger, the David Mellor shop and Bedfont Lakes combined. In part, this commission led to the projects featured in this survey that focuses on Hopkins Architects' most recent move into America, to work on buildings for four of America's leading academic institutions.

This tranche of work had two triggers, Bob Stern's invitation to Michael Hopkins to teach at Yale, and Jubilee Campus client Chris Jagger's introduction to work in Arizona. This led to four separate commissions across the country with a 6500sqm Applied Research Building at the Northern Arizona University at Flagstaff, completed last year; the 6500sqm School of Forestry and Environmental Studies at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, due for completion later this year; a pair of new collegiate dormitories, totalling 22 000sqm at Rice University, scheduled to complete in 2009; and a 25 000sqm chemistry building at Princeton University that will open in 2010.

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Across such a range of scales, programmes and locations, it would be spurious to try to draw too many direct comparisons. However, in conversation with directors Bill Taylor, Andy Barnett and Mike Taylor and project director Henry Kong, a number of key themes emerge, all of which focus on the issue of how to manage risk and innovation, with all four projects having at least one key component that risk averse clients and design teams would traditionally avoid. At Arizona this related to the building's actual anatomy, with Hopkins proposing a large south-facing atrium; at Yale, to an integrated and holistic environmental strategy, with an adiabatic air-handling system in place of traditional air conditioning; at Rice to a mixed mode of traditional and revolutionary construction techniques. And at Princeton, this related to their proposals for a socio/programmatic innovation that challenged long established relationships between the chemistry laboratories and their respective write-up spaces.

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The Applied Research Building at Arizona is now complete, and has been awarded Platinum Certification by the US Green Building Council (the highest rating for sustainability under the LEED programme), and while a three-storey south-facing atrium that captures winter sun and serves as a thermal buffer is not necessarily a new idea, it took time for the architect to convince the project board that this strategy should be adopted. However, as noted by Mike Taylor, it is clear that American clients are becoming increasingly interested in sustainability and are prepared to employ architects who can bring specific expertise of integrated engineering approaches.

Pure engineering, however, is never enough, which is where the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies at Yale demonstrates how an architectural language can be developed to express a building's unique relationship to site and programme; here, employing local sandstone to create two parallel walls that unite the campus quad, while opening up views to the mature wooded landscape from the school's attic storey Environment Centre. Set within a dramatic glulam timber structure, this gently curved form will eventually be clad with solid pv panels to the south, and an array of glass-embedded pvs along the length of the convex roof light ridge.

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At Rice, set within the context of its axial 1930s campus plan, and in response to the many finely detailed brick buildings on site, Hopkins have created two new college dormitories that create their own landscaped enclosures. Arranged around separate dining halls and a shared catering core, the plan extends the campus grain to preserve precious green space. Working within the traditional format of shared double rooms, innovation has come with mixed mode construction, combining traditional masonry construction and exposed concrete soffits, with state of the art fibreglass prefabrication bathroom pods.