The architect Sir Michael Hopkins, who has died aged 88, occupied a special place in a much abused profession. The best known Hopkins buildings – the Mound stand at Lord’s cricket ground, Glyndebourne opera house, Westminster underground station, the 2012 Olympic velodrome – command not only respect but positive affection. Hopkins gave modern architecture a human face.
At the start of his career, he seemed inextricably linked to the young turks of high tech, Richard Rogers and Norman Foster, designing steel-frame buildings of immaculate precision. From the late 1960s, Hopkins spent eight productive years in partnership with Foster. The Willis Faber and Dumas headquarters in Ipswich, Suffolk, was the peak of their collaboration. But his later architecture took a different and more original direction as he became more concerned with the history of building and the place of architecture in the landscape. This growing sense of context brought his buildings a new richness, a poetic modernity rooted in his understanding of the past.
