James Greaves of Hopkins

Hopkins director James Greaves puts work on hold to tell TiC why timber is at the very core of the practice's thinking.

PINNING DOWN Hopkins director James Greaves is a nightmare.

Flitting between Dubai, Jersey and the UK, Greaves epitomizes the current wave of opportunity for British architects, picking up work both home and abroad.

His heavy commitments abroad make pinning him down troublesome. “Sorry about Friday – bit of a nightmare getting back from Dubai!” one of many apologetic emails reads.

In Dubai, Greaves is assisting the practice’s 50-strong team in piecing together a masterplan for the Dubai World Trade Centre: approximately 20 buildings including offices, apartments and hotels pushing for LEED Gold standard – the US’s equivalent of BREEAM’s assessment method.

And in Jersey, he is part of a design team lowering a dual carriageway in St Hellier to connect the old town with the waterfront, as part of a £350m masterplan for a new financial centre.

From Brighton to Dubai
It is a far cry from where he was thirty years ago. Then I would have just gone down to Brighton seafront to catch Greaves for a chat. Working for David Grey Associates, his first job on a placement year from Sheffield’s School of Architecture was to refurbish the toilets on the seafront.

“The first question I asked myself was, ‘How does the drainage work?’” he laughs.

Walking into the toilets must have been quite a comedown after spending much of his earlier life in Rome and travelling around Europe admiring “marvelous” buildings.

Greaves’ earliest memory of architecture was studying French cathedrals. His father, a Rome Scholar in sculpture, used to get his son to draw them.

But the toilets on Brighton seafront required practical planning to stop them flooding. And 30 years on, Greaves has carried that practical nous into his design ethic.

The raft of sustainable legislation swamping the construction industry is causing architects to go back to the drawing board to re-learn the art of specification and to fully understand materials and their effect on the environment.

“There is always a process of evolution about any material understanding,” he says.  His practical nous is very much at home with Hopkins, who he has served with now for more than 20 years. Its chairman, Sir Michael Hopkins, is regarded as one of the forerunners in challenging conventional architectural wisdom. Greaves describes his boss as his biggest mentor. “He’s a very clear thinker and can see straight through to the core of the issue,” he says.

If the practice has a signature, it is that its designs are unmistakably fashionable. Greaves’ projects leap from the suspended high tech fabric roof of The Schlumberger Cambridge Research Centre to the oval-shaped Queen’s Building that sits respectably inside Cambridge’s historic Emmanuel College.

And right now, explains Greaves, timber goes through the core of the practice’s designs.

Hopkins picked up three separate Wood Awards for Glyndebourne Opera House, Portcullis House and, most recently, for Norwich Cathedral Refectory.

After his work at Emmanuel College, Greaves was asked on to the judging panel for the awards. “We’re using timber quite extensively as you can imagine,” he says. “Just like we take time to understand the material, I think the industry has to re-understand what timber does.”

Medieval conviction
Due for completion at the end of the year is Greaves’ latest foray into timber design: a £30m extension to Bury St Edmunds, one of England’s best-preserved market towns.

The design is broken down into six buildings with cafes and shops at ground level with two-storey flats above. At the centre of the scheme is a new civic building.

The residential units are being built using redwood timber to compliment the town’s medieval resonance with the material.

Hopkins did the detailed design and Taylor Woodrow is expected to complete the scheme within the next six months.

The scheme represented a major challenge to connect the 5ha cattle market site with the town’s medieval grid structure, layed out by Abbot Baldwin in the ninth century.

“One of the devices we used to understand the grid and to extend it was to put a new square in the scheme and anchor it with a civic building,” says Greaves. “It is not just a square surrounded by shops, but it is also a large public venue which engages directly with the town.”

Cabe described the scheme as an intelligent approach to town planning. 

Part of the specification at Bury St. Edmunds is to stain the redwood with a one-off silver-coloured finish. The idea behind it, explains Greaves, is to stain the wood a colour that simulates what it will look like once the timber weathers, so the building’s appearance will be consistent. “We are using a stain that tries to emulate the finished colour so when you lose it, which you inevitably will through weathering, the silver of the timber is comparable to the areas of the wood that are not exposed to the environment.”

The idea is just one of a host of measures Greaves is looking at in his and Hopkins’ bid to re-understand materials.

Greaves is also a keen advocate of moving away from chemical preservatives. “In Austria they don’t treat their softwoods,” he says. “I think it is a good thing to reduce the amount of chemicals that go into a building.

“Certain woods obviously do need to be preservative treated but larch, for example, should be fine. It is naturally durable softwood. If it is detailed properly there should be no reason why you’d need to pressuretreat it.”

He stresses that larch sourced from a high altitude or that is grown in a cold climate will be more durable. “It grows slower so it has a tighter grain which makes it more durable and consistent,” he says.

Olympic gold
Last year Hopkins beat Wilkinson Eyre and David Chipperfield, among others, to design the 6,000-seater Olympic Velodrome.

While the cost and detailing of the materials is under review, the track will be made from 40mm x 40mm strips of Siberian pine, also used for the Laoshan Velodrome in Beijing for this summer’s Olympic games.

With the Wood Awards resurfacing again this September, Greaves will be juggling his commitments to join a panel of six, which includes one other architect, Giles Downes, at Carpenters’ Hall in June to assess the 200 submissions.

“The buildings that win for me,” says Greaves, “are the ones that engage on different levels. Questions like, ‘is the design right? Has it been the right use of timber? Has it been very well detailed and built?’”

This will be Greaves’ fourth year as a judge. I ask if there have been any trends in that time? “There are an ever increasing number of entrants,” he says. “Wood is becoming a major building material and is being increasingly used in buildings, not just for cladding but structurally too.”

It seems the practicality of the Brighton seafront job has served Greaves well; “I’d recommend it to any trainee architect,” he says wistfully, before dashing off the phone to get to the airport.