Nicholas Grimshaw

Nicholas Grimshaw was born on 9 October 1939 in Hove, in East Sussex. His father, an aircraft engineer, died when he was two; he grew up in Guildford with his mother and grandmother, both artists. As a boy he made Meccano models and built tree houses, and he was fascinated by boats. He attended the Edinburgh College of Art, then the Architectural Association in London, where his teachers included Peter Cook and Cedric Price and from which he graduated with honours in 1965. Soon after leaving the school he went into practice with Terry Farrell. Their partnership lasted fifteen years and produced, among other buildings, the 125 Park Road apartments on the edge of Regent's Park, then the Herman Miller factory in Bath (1976). When Farrell embraced postmodernism, which Grimshaw rejected, they parted ways, and in 1980 Grimshaw founded his own practice, Nicholas Grimshaw & Partners, now Grimshaw. He chaired it until 2019, when Andrew Whalley succeeded him.

He tied his work to Joseph Paxton and Isambard Kingdom Brunel rather than to a school: "I've never liked the term 'hi-tech'," he said. "It sounds like a stylistic movement. We see ourselves as very solidly grounded in Paxton and Brunel." He also likened the practice of architecture to boat-building: "It's about materials and structures doing real things, as opposed to decorative things." In London, the Financial Times printworks (1988) put the making of the newspaper in front of passers-by, inside a glass box, and earned him a RIBA award. For the British Pavilion at the Seville Expo in 1992 he raised a modular structure topped with solar panels, whose energy powered a wall of water cooling the pavilion and its visitors. The international terminal at Waterloo station, whose asymmetrical arched roof was inspired by the skeleton of a human hand, received the Mies van der Rohe Award in 1994, along with the RIBA's building of the year prize; it was the project of which he remained proudest.

One of his best-known works is the Eden Project in Cornwall, conceived by Tim Smit and Jonathan Ball in a former china clay pit, with structural engineering by Anthony Hunt Associates. Grimshaw started from the geodesic system made famous by Buckminster Fuller, then hit on the idea of soap bubbles, which adapt to any surface, to cope with a pit that was still being worked and whose ground kept shifting. Each dome is a two-layer space frame, hexagons (and a few pentagons) on the outside, hexagons and triangles on the inside; the glazing is made of three-layer ETFE pillows inflated to a depth of two metres, and the steel weighs little more than the air held in the biomes. The project was completed in 2000. "I asked for the eighth wonder of the world and I got it," said Tim Smit, Eden's co-founder. His practice designed other biome complexes: the Ecorium in Seocheon, for South Korea's national institute of ecology, completed in 2013 with Samoo as associate architect, where steel arches carry lightweight glazing over biomes recreating tropical rainforest, desert, Mediterranean, polar and temperate settings; and the Oman Botanic Garden in Muscat, whose project, at the foot of the Al Hajar Mountains, covers 420 hectares, with two biomes and eight habitats.

A CBE, Nicholas Grimshaw was elected to the Royal Academy in 1994 and knighted in 2002; from 2004 to 2011 he presided over the Royal Academy of Arts. The RIBA awarded him its Royal Gold Medal in 2019; its president, Ben Derbyshire, praised him "for an extraordinary number of buildings and infrastructure projects of international significance, and for the continuous development of an architecture that places technology at the heart of the aesthetic". In 2022 he founded the Grimshaw Foundation, which helps under-represented young people develop skills for creative careers. He died on 14 September 2025, aged 85. For Andrew Whalley, chairman of the practice, his architecture "was never about surface or fashion, but always about structure, craft, and purpose"; he wanted buildings that, in his own words, "bring some kind of joy".