Nicholas Grimshaw PRA
Born: 9 October 1939
Elected RA: 23 May 1994
Elected President: 2004
Category of Membership: Architect
Elected President of the Royal Academy in 2004, Sir Nicholas Grimshaw brought the 'high tech' tradition of British architecture to a refined pitch – and since then has shown how it might relate to awkward urban sites and traditional materials. After studying at the Edinburgh College of Art, and the Architectural Association in London, he went into partnership with Terry Farrell in 1965. Features such as modular staircase towers clipped onto the back of a Bayswater terrace converted into a student hostel revealed a talent for innovative, low cost construction, which he developed in a series of cheap but elegant industrial buildings.
Nicholas Grimshaw PRA, Frankfurt Trade Fair Hall
Single volume, large span, lightweight sheds like factories and sport halls were the early mainstay of Nicholas Grimshaw and Partners, the practice now known as Grimshaw which he founded after splitting with Farrell in 1980. The volumes themselves were often ordinary and pre-determined, but he made them memorable by giving them structures which followed the lines of force. This fitted the Modernist tenet that structure should express the load it carries, but also meant that the components could be smaller and more delicate because they were precisely where they needed to be. Masts, struts and expressive exo-skeletons made otherwise banal building types beautiful and intriguing.
Another level to his architecture emerged in several large buildings on complicated urban sites in the late 1980s. Structural inventiveness helped to create a large Sainsbury’s store and associated buildings including canalside housing on an awkwardly shaped site in Camden Town, but most dramatic of all was the Channel Tunnel Rail Terminal at Waterloo Station. Lighter and more dynamic than the great 19th century train sheds, it updates that tradition of innovative, engineering-led structures for the 21st century. By exploiting a new understanding of structure it adapts to the serpentine length and irregular width of the existing track.
The 1990s saw Grimshaw’s architecture continue to become more diverse in function, varied in location and richer in expression. Buildings with complex interiors like offices and transport terminals emerged alongside industrial sheds, but it was in the Eden Project that function and expression became most closely matched. The delicate, filigree architectural forms have a distinct affinity with the natural sinuousness of the plants inside, perhaps confirming the long held suspicion that ‘High Tech’ has its roots in the Gothic Revival.
Over the last decade Grimshaw has also become a genuinely urban architect, with commissions for a tall tower in the City of London, an art gallery in La Coruna, Spain, housing at Battersea Power Station and most notably, the sensuous reconstruction of the spa at Bath. Designing for that most sensuous of functions in England’s premier classical town shows how far his architecture has transcended its puritanical and gothic origins.
Contact details for further information
Email membershipoffice@royalacademy.org.uk
