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Cooper, Sir (Thomas) Edwin
(b Scarborough, Yorks, 21 Oct 1874; d London, 24 June 1942). English architect. He began practice in Scarborough in 1893, designing the fine, Georgian-inspired Westwood Higher Grade Schools (1897), Scarborough. With S. B. Russell (1864–1955) he won the competition for Hull Guildhall (1905; built 1906–14; for illustration see HULL), Humberside, an extended Corinthian colonnade with end pavilions topped by sculptural chariot groups. Marylebone Town Hall (1911), London, also won in competition, reflects the contemporary American-inspired tendency to simplicity, while the Port of London Authority building (1912; completed 1922), London, is surmounted by an ornamental tower combining the Neo-Grec with Baroque ornamentation. Cooper’s major inter-war works include the Star and Garter Home (1921), Richmond, London, and Lloyds (1925; destr. 1980), Leadenhall Street, London, an ingenious piece of planning that combined richness and sobriety. Cooper’s style was ideally suited to the needs of commercial city architecture, but he also designed hospital buildings, notably for St Mary’s Hospital (1931–7), Praed Street, London, and university and school buildings. His work for the Port of London Authority at Tilbury, Essex, included the impressive Baggage Hall (1929). Cooper’s domestic work suffers from a frigidity of style. Although his major essays in classical design have been less highly valued than those of his contemporaries, such as E. Vincent Harris, the Lloyds building showed his skill and originality, while Inchcapes (1922; formerly Spillers), St Mary Axe, London, is a well-integrated office building in the Victorian palazzo tradition, with fine plasterwork and joinery. A later, more conspicuous, work is the National Westminster Bank (1929; formerly National and Provincial Bank), Princes Street, London, in which Cooper employed his favourite device of a grand Corinthian order, as he did in his St Marylebone Public Library (1939), showing how little his style had changed over nearly 30 years.
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