‘I asked for the eighth wonder of the world and I got it,” declared Tim Smit, co-founder of the Eden Project designed by Nicholas Grimshaw, who has died at 85. In a Cornish china clay quarry, a cluster of geodesic domes resembling monumental soap bubbles enclose conservatories housing luxuriant plant eco-systems. Completed in 2000, it was one of Grimshaw’s most ambitious and audacious projects, seemingly springing from the mind of a science fiction novelist rather than an architect.
But however thrillingly futuristic Grimshaw’s buildings appeared, they were grounded by an avid interest in engineering and craft, and how historic precedents could be transformed and adapted for the modern era. Instead of using glass for the Eden Project’s domes, Grimshaw employed gossamer-light foil cushions.
When passenger rail services through the Channel tunnel first began operating in 1994, the British end was marked by a new international terminus at London’s Waterloo Station. Grimshaw conjured a radical reimagining of the Victorian iron and glass train shed that his 19th-century predecessors would immediately recognise. The inspiration for the roof’s asymmetrical arched form, a design feat made all the more complex by being curved on plan, was the skeleton of a human hand. Intricately pin-jointed to accommodate the deflection imposed by trains, a glazed roof vault encased platforms in a delicately transparent cocoon. Underneath, a sleek, airport-style concourse whisked passengers up to the platform.
Thinking big … the former Eurostar terminal at Waterloo, London, designed by Nicholas Grimshaw. Photograph: Jo Reid & John Peck
Though it endured a forlorn period after Eurostar switched its operations to St Pancras in 2007, it has since been incorporated back into the main station as part of a major refurbishment, so that commuters heading for the home counties can experience the same frisson as those original Paris-bound adventurers.
Hi-tech architecture was often calculated to appear at its best in a mechanistic, depopulated state, but Grimshaw’s output of stations, airports, trade fair halls, sports complexes and even the odd supermarket, civilised and elevated the everyday experience of catching a train or going shopping.
Sainsbury’s supermarket, Camden Road, London. Photograph: Geoffrey Taunton/Alamy
Part aircraft carrier, part aircraft hangar, Sainsbury’s Camden superstore (1988) was a muscular, metallic armature that brought a touch of Mad Max to the weekly shop. Grimshaw even designed a new kind of ramped travelator that locked on to shopping trolleys to convey customers down to the basement car park. It was characteristic of his attention to detail and confidence in technology to solve the most quotidian of problems.
Early standout projects included Oxford Ice Rink (1984), a daring, column-free structure suspended by a cat’s cradle of cables from two towering masts and clad in silver panels more commonly used in cold stores. The Financial Times print works (1988) invigorated a bleak part of London’s terraforming Docklands by putting the ballet mécanique of newspaper production on public view inside an immaculately engineered glass box. Passersby could watch the FT emerge each day in a Heath Robinson-style tableau of whirring machinery and pink newsprint.
Invigorating … Nicholas Grimshaw’s Financial Times print works in London. Photograph: Bildarchiv Monheim GmbH/Alamy
Commissioned to design the British Pavilion for the 1992 Seville Expo, Grimshaw devised an elegant, modular structure topped by a rippling cockscomb of solar panels. These provided the energy to power a wall of water which cooled the pavilion and its visitors in Seville’s searing summer heat. The headquarters for the Western Morning News (1993) was conceived as a futuristic galleon in full sail on a hillside outside Plymouth, while in Berlin, the Ludwig Erhard Haus (1998), designed to house the reunified city’s Chamber of Commerce, was suspended from a ribcage of parabolic steel arches, hoisted into position as theatrically as the timber frames of a medieval barn.
Railway stations were a recurring theme. After the success of Waterloo, Grimshaw went on to revitalise London’s Paddington (1999), stripping away accumulated accretions to reveal the engineering puissance of Isambard Kingdom Brunel. Latterly, towards the end of his career, his firm was given the herculean task of sorting out London Bridge, once described by John Betjeman as “the most complicated, muddled and unwelcoming of all London termini”. Where there was dinginess and disorder there is now clarity and connection, expressed in a cavernous new concourse and a concerto of escalators and lifts. Even Betjeman might be able to find his way around.
A new kind of factory … Bath Schools of Art and Design. Photograph: Nicholas Grimshaw Architects
Another much larger London infrastructure project, the Elizabeth Line, won last year’s RIBA Stirling prize, shared with design team collaborators Maynard, Equation and AtkinsRéalis. “Descending into the colossal network of tunnels feels like entering a portal to the future, where the typical commuter chaos is transformed into an effortless experience,” said RIBA president Muyiwa Oki.
Grimshaw was always keen to point out that technology evolves and circumstances change, but the trick is to produce architecture that is agile and adaptable. This was perhaps most persuasively demonstrated by the successful 2019 remodelling of the Herman Miller furniture factory to house the Bath Schools of Art and Design. Originally completed in 1976, when Grimshaw was in partnership with Terry Farrell, the archetypal slick industrial shed is now another kind of factory, an incubator for the processes of creation, making, experimentation and learning, showing that buildings could – and should – have second lives.
