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One requested the next wonder of the world and I got it,” stated Tim Smit, co-founder of the iconic conservatories designed by Nicholas Grimshaw, who passed away at eighty-five. Located in a Cornish china clay quarry, a group of spherical structures evoking imposing soap bubbles house greenhouses sheltering lush plant environments. Finished in 2000, it was among Grimshaw’s boldest and innovative projects, almost emerging from the mind of a futurist writer rather than an architect.

Structural Excellence and Traditional Roots

Yet despite how thrillingly forward-looking Grimshaw’s structures looked, they were grounded by an passionate interest in construction and craft, and how historic precedents could be reimagined and adjusted for the contemporary age. Instead of using glass for the Eden Project’s domes, Grimshaw opted for ultra-lightweight foil cushions.

Revolutionizing Rail Travel

At the time passenger rail services through the subsea passage first began running in 1994, the British end was signaled by a new global gateway at London’s Waterloo Station. Grimshaw created a bold reinvention of the 19th-century iron and glass train shed that his earlier architects would instantly recognise. The concept for the roof’s irregular arched form, a design accomplishment made all the more complex by being curved on plan, was the structure of a palm. Precisely connected to accommodate the movement caused by trains, a glass roof vault encased platforms in a delicately transparent shell. Beneath, a sleek, contemporary concourse ushered passengers up to the platform.

Even though it experienced a forlorn period after Eurostar transferred its operations to St Pancras in 2007, it has since been merged back into the main station as part of a extensive renovation, so that travelers heading for the suburban areas can experience the same thrill as those first Paris-bound travelers.

Enhancing Ordinary Locales

Hi-tech architecture was often intended to appear at its best in a industrial, depopulated state, but Grimshaw’s output of stations, airports, trade fair halls, sports complexes and even the odd supermarket, refined and elevated the routine experience of catching a train or going shopping.

Partly aircraft carrier, somewhat aircraft hangar, Sainsbury’s Camden retail outlet (1988) was a strong, metallic framework that brought a touch of post-apocalyptic to the shopping trip. Grimshaw even designed a new kind of sloped moving walkway that attached to shopping trolleys to transport customers down to the basement car park. It was typical of his precision and faith in technology to address the most quotidian of problems.

Notable Designs

Pioneering memorable projects included Oxford Ice Rink (1984), a daring, column-free structure hung by a web of cables from two looming masts and wrapped in silver panels more typically used in cold stores. The Financial Times print works (1988) invigorated a dreary part of London’s terraforming Docklands by putting the ballet mécanique of newspaper production on show inside an perfectly engineered glass box. Passersby could watch the FT appear each day in a Rube Goldberg-esque display of rotating machinery and distinctive newsprint.

International and Versatile Vision

Hired to design the British Pavilion for the 1992 Seville Expo, Grimshaw created an refined, modular structure topped by a undulating crest of solar panels. These supplied the energy to power a wall of water which cooled the pavilion and its visitors in Seville’s blistering summer heat. The headquarters for the Western Morning News (1993) was envisioned as a futuristic ship in full sail on a elevation outside Plymouth, while in Berlin, the Ludwig Erhard Haus (1998), designed to host the integrated city’s Chamber of Commerce, was suspended from a skeletal framework of arched steel arches, hoisted into position as theatrically as the timber frames of a ancient barn.

Legacy in Infrastructure Development

Railway stations were a common theme. After the success of Waterloo, Grimshaw went on to refresh London’s Paddington (1999), removing layered accretions to expose the engineering puissance of Isambard Kingdom Brunel. Later, towards the end of his career, his firm was given the massive task of overhauling London Bridge, once described by John Betjeman as “the most complex, disordered and inhospitable of all London termini”. Where there was dinginess and chaos there is now simplicity and linkage, shown in a spacious new concourse and a concerto of escalators and lifts. Even Betjeman might be able to navigate.

Flexible Construction for Evolving Circumstances

Another much larger London infrastructure project, the Elizabeth Line, won last year’s RIBA Stirling prize, shared with design team partners Maynard, Equation and AtkinsRéalis. “Going down into the colossal network of tunnels feels like stepping into a portal to the future, where the typical commuter disorder is transformed into an effortless experience,” said RIBA president Muyiwa Oki.

Grimshaw was always eager to point out that technology evolves and circumstances change, but the skill is to produce architecture that is adaptable and versatile. This was perhaps most persuasively demonstrated by the successful 2019 renovation of the Herman Miller furniture factory to accommodate the Bath Schools of Art and Design. Originally completed in 1976, when Grimshaw was in collaboration with Terry Farrell, the archetypal polished industrial shed is now another kind of factory, an hub for the methods of creation, making, experimentation and learning, showing that buildings could – and should – have new purposes.