Name Alfred Hopkins Role Architect | Died May 1941 | |
Books The English village church | ||
S. Alfred Hopkins (1870 — May 1941) was an American architect, an "estate architect" who specialized in country houses and especially in model farms in an invented "vernacular" style suited to the American elite. His practice, established in 1912 as Alfred Hopkins & Associates, was mostly based in New York, where he was the "dean of farm group architecture," in Westchester County, northern New Jersey and Long Island; he also built two gentlemen's farms in Illinois. He built fifteen of his practical and esthetic farm group complexes on Long Island, including one for Louis Comfort Tiffany at Laurelton Hall. An article on farm groupings published in Architectural Record in 1915 notes that Hopkins was often called upon to design the farm groups on estates where the residences were the work of other architects, such as Bertram Goodhue, John Russell Pope and Charles A. Platt.
Hopkins was among the contributors to Stables and Farm Buildings: A Special Number of the Architectural Review produced by the staff of Architectural Review in 1902. His Modern Farm Buildings served to publicize his practical and picturesque esthetic, and in common with all architects' publications since the sixteenth century, to attract clients. Hopkins' book went into a third edition.
Hopkins laid out his farm buildings around paved courts or grassed paddocks, keeping rooflines and eaves low to blend with the landscape, and carefully separating the necessary farming functions. He preferred to remove hay storage from its traditional loft over the stables to eliminate dust infiltration and ammonia pollution. Open-sided sheds housed farm vehicles. The spatial routes of cows and horses were kept separate. Farmhands' quarters were integrated with the buildings. An outstanding late survival of Hopkins' Cotswolds-inspired vernacular manner is the stable court at Hartwood, near Pittsburgh (1929). The same year he published a brochure distributed among architects, Two Cotswolds Villages, describing the vernacular architecture and stone-tiled roofs of two picturesque English villages: Bibury, Gloucestershire and Castle Combe, Wiltshire.
Hopkins is less known for his Prisons and Prison Building (New York: Architectural Book Publishing 1930), where rational planning met other ends, in a progressive and humane program based on the classification of prisoners and their segregation by groups in small units; proposals that argued against walled prisons and for the uplifting effect of good architecture. His practical experience was founded on his work at Westchester County Penitentiary, Berks County Prison, and his proposed designs for a federal prison to be built at Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary, completed in 1934.
Hopkins was also among the architects who published plans for inexpensive carpenter-built housing in Carpentry and Building. and his small book Planning for sunshine and fresh air: Being sundry discourses & excursions in the pleasant art of building homes, set forth in a manner and upon a theory ... how best to effect their proper economies appeared in 1931.
He also published The Fundamentals of Good Bank Building (1929).
After an interim following his death, an architectural firm was founded in 1954 by six associates from his office, as La Pierre, Litchfield & Partners.