Chris Wilkinson, who has died aged 76, was the co-founder of the architecture practice that most defined the technocratic optimism of the millennium projects era. WilkinsonEyre were the first architects to win the RIBA Stirling prize two years running, for their Magna science centre in Rotherham in 2001 and the Gateshead Millennium Bridge in 2002, both of which exemplified the firm’s poetic reinterpretation of British high-tech traditions. Their success would lead to a string of international commissions that saw Wilkinson preside over a 200-strong firm, with projects ranging from streamlined skyscrapers in China to futuristic botanical gardens in Singapore.

The Magna centre began the new millennium with a post-industrial bang. It was a thrilling reinvigoration of a huge redundant steelworks, which was to science what the Tate Modern was to art, both setting the mould for a generation of visitor attractions housed inside dramatic industrial buildings. It took visitors on a theatrical journey along elevated gantries between a series of glowing pods, culminating inside a silvery sci-fi zeppelin hovering in the red-tinged gloom.

WilkinsonEyre’s “blinking bridge” across the Tyne brought similar theatrics to the timeless challenge of how to span a body of water while accommodating the need for ships to pass through. Composed from two graceful parabolic arcs, one forming the pedestrian deck and the other supporting it, it was designed to rotate on an axis, like an opening eyelid, and became an elegant icon of Gateshead’s riverside regeneration that has stood the test of time.

The success of these two projects, and the accompanying glare of the media spotlight, prompted the practice to look for work overseas, where it built the sleek Guangzhou International Finance Centre tower, followed by the Gardens By the Bay in Singapore, setting it on the way to becoming a globally recognised firm.

Wilkinson was born in Amersham, Buckinghamshire. His father, Tony, was a surveyor at Unilever, and his mother, Norma (nee Treleaven Beer), had been part of the war effort in her youth. He attended St Alban’s school, where he learned a love of drawing that led him to pursue an art foundation course, before studying architecture at the Polytechnic of Central London (now University of Westminster). Graduating in 1970, he worked for Denys Lasdun on the National Theatre, before taking three months off to travel in Greece where, he said, it became clear that Norman Foster and Richard Rogers were “the future which I wanted to be part of”.

He rushed home and applied to work at both firms, and was accepted at Foster’s in 1971. He described it as “an incredible time”, when the practice was still very small and creative, a place where he “learned everything”. He worked mostly with Michael Hopkins, Foster’s partner at the time, and joined Hopkins when he started his own office in 1976, where Wilkinson worked on the Greene King brewery and Willis Faber’s headquarters at 10 Trinity Square. After five years he left to join the Richard Rogers Partnership, where he played a key early role in the design of Lloyd’s of London – which in 2011 became the youngest ever building to be Grade I-listed.

Wilkinson’s experience with these three titans of the British high-tech movement was profoundly formative, instilling a love of exposing the structure of buildings and celebrating the latest technologies used to build them. A keen painter, he fused that interest in technology with his own more artistic sensibility, indulging in sensuous curves and more streamlined forms, developing a style that has since become ubiquitous for airports, conference centres and corporate headquarters around the world.

He launched his own practice in 1983, and was joined four years later by Jim Eyre, with whom he had worked at Hopkins (the firm was rebranded WilkinsonEyre in 1999). They began with small projects, passed on by Rogers and Hopkins, but their breakthrough came in 1991 when they won the competition for the Stratford Market train depot on the Jubilee line extension. Housing train maintenance and stabling facilities alongside office and ancillary spaces, the building exudes the duo’s interest in heroic steel structures, featuring a diagrid space-frame roof that leaps across the 190-metre-long space in a gentle arc, supported on treelike columns.

It embodied many of the principles espoused in Wilkinson’s book Supersheds, published the same year. Described by Building magazine as “the book that put the glamour back into the large-volume, clearspan space”, it was a paean to warehouses, train sheds and other long-span industrial structures, drawing on Wilkinson’s travels in the US. It revived an interest in the potential for “universal space” covered by suspended canopies, space frames and tensile fabric membranes that would continue throughout the 1990s, influencing the design of everything from stations to supermarkets.

Wilkinson’s lean, techno-centric approach attracted the eye of the inventor James Dyson, who commissioned the practice to design his company’s headquarters in Malmesbury, Wiltshire, in 1992, beginning a relationship that continued for three decades. The campus neatly charts the evolution of the firm, from the first undulating roofed factory, to mirrored glass office pavilions, to a recent cluster of modular student accommodation pods for the Dyson Institute of Engineering and Technology.

In a 2019 interview, Wilkinson recalled that Dyson was particularly fond of the flagship store they designed for him in Paris in 2000. “We put all the vacuums on pedestals,” he said. “They were like artworks. He liked that.” It began a trend for technology stores designed like contemporary art galleries, which brands such as Apple and Samsung have since taken to extremes.

The dawn of the millennium marked a shift in scale. Wilkinson was appointed OBE in the millennium honours list and the lottery-funded Millennium Commission provided a pipeline of substantial opportunities for architects of this generation. WilkinsonEyre profited handsomely, starting with the National Waterfront Museum in Swansea, followed by the Explore@Bristol science centre, which began an interest in working with listed buildings. Then came the celebrated Magna centre and the Gateshead bridge, allowing the practice to grow and projecting the architects to a level of public exposure that, while gratifying, also felt uncomfortable. “It was great in many ways but it caused us a few problems,” Wilkinson said in an interview last year. “Some articles were written about us that were a bit personal so we decided to lie low for a while rather than making the most of every opportunity that came our way.”

They focused on China instead, where they secured the commission for the 440-metre-high Guangzhou Tower. It was a key project for Wilkinson, who increasingly saw the sculptural qualities as more important to their work, keen to introduce a freer artistic approach – while Eyre, the bridge specialist, obsessed over the precise geometry and its rationalisation.

Wilkinson’s election to the Royal Academy in 2006 had been a significant moment, encouraging him to enjoy more freedom and take inspiration in his painting and drawing, which became a lifelong passion. He spent the Covid lockdowns painting big abstract acrylic canvases while listening to Pink Floyd and Mozart in his garden-facing dining room, a space he designed in 1996 with full-height frameless glazing and a rooflight inspired by the artist James Turrell.

The Guangzhou Tower helped WilkinsonEyre secure further work in Asia, including the Singapore gardens project, conceived as an Avatar-like world of organic glasshouses and strange glowing steel trees. The two projects won the RIBA’s international Lubetkin prize, back-to-back once again, in 2012 and 2013, catapulting the practice into further major global commissions. But the larger the office grew, the more varied became the quality of the work.

One of Wilkinson’s most controversial legacies now looms over Sydney’s waterfront, in the form of the 271-metre-high One Barangaroo casino hotel complex, the tallest building in the city, locally nicknamed “Packer’s Pecker” after its billionaire backer James Packer. Built on a site originally earmarked for parkland, for a developer alleged to facilitate money laundering for criminal gangs, to many eyes the project represents everything that’s wrong with Australia’s anything-goes approach to city planning.

Back in the UK, other contentious later works include the Siemens Crystal at the Royal Docks, a contorted glass corporate showcase, soon to be home to the relocated City Hall, and the nearby Emirates Air Line cable car, whose fault lies less in the quality of its design than its questionable usefulness.

Over his 40-year career, the project Wilkinson said he was most proud of was the Maggie’s Centre at the Churchill hospital in Oxford, built in 2014. Conceived as an angular treehouse, it explored the possibilities of cross-laminated timber and his passion for freer geometries, which Eyre suggests reflected his love of jazz music. His last realised building will be the Dodington Art Gallery for James and Deirdre Dyson on the couple’s estate, due to open in 2023 – fittingly bringing his passions full circle, with a slender diagrid roof covering a clear-span space below.

Wilkinson is survived by his wife, Diana (nee Edmunds), whom he married in 1976, and their children, Zoe and Dominic.

Christopher John Wilkinson, architect, born 1 July 1945; died 14 December 2021