15 Facts About Alfred Hopkins

Alfred Harral Hopkins 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.

Alfred Hopkins was a member of the American Institute of Architects.

Alfred Hopkins's parents were Alfred Hopkins, a captain in the United States Navy, and Mary Elizabeth Penfield.

Alfred Hopkins studied at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris followed by several years in Rome completing his knowledge architecture, presumably in the early 1890s.

Early in his career, Alfred Hopkins specialized in the design of farming complexes for the American capitalist during the Gilded Age.

Alfred Hopkins continued specializing in gentlemen's farms, quickly establishing himself as the "dean of farm group architecture," due in no small part to the success of his Modern Farm Buildings, first published in 1913 and two subsequent editions.

Alfred Hopkins designed no fewer than fifteen farm groups on Long Island, including the farm at Laurelton Hall for Louis Comfort Tiffany.

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.

Alfred 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.

Alfred 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.

Alfred Hopkins preferred to remove hay storage from its traditional loft over the stables to eliminate dust infiltration and ammonia pollution.

An outstanding late survival of Alfred Hopkins' Cotswolds-inspired vernacular manner is the stable court at Hartwood, near Pittsburgh.

Alfred Hopkins is less known for his Prisons and Prison Building, 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.

Alfred Hopkins was among the architects who published plans for inexpensive carpenter-built housing in Carpentry and Building.

Alfred Hopkins published The Fundamentals of Good Bank Building in 1929.