Interview 8
the lend lease / architects’ journal awards
Former RA president and Royal Academician Nicholas Grimshaw recalls his time presiding over the Piccadilly institution
Designer of the 2001 Eden Project, recipient of a knighthood in 2002, president of the Royal Academy of Arts between 2004 and 2011, leader of an international practice inspired by the crafted precisions of Jean Prouvé and the Victorian pragmatism of Paxton. How does one avoid festschrift-speak when profiling Nicholas Grimshaw’s time at the heart of Royal Academy? Perhaps by pointing out that on his first schoolboy visit to the RA in 1953, ‘one had escaped, so it was a quick whip round the summer show, and then straight out into Piccadilly to an espresso coffee bar’. Te RA’s incidental status in Grimshaw’s life
continued into the 1960s, although one imagines that he could have breezed through Colen Campbell’s 18th- century portals wearing his Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band outfit without causing too much affront. But, by the 1980s, he’d got the message, and the 1988 Sainsbury superstore in Camden was one of his first accepted Summer Show exhibits.
Architecture’s a tough business. But at the RA you could rise above that and produce something beautiful
‘Tere was always a terrific debate in the practice about whether you could present a project properly at the summer show,’ he recalls. ‘Tis idea that you couldn’t explain a scheme properly with a drawing or a model. But there was also this idea at the RA of an architectural object that could have artistic merit. ‘Te big issue was that architecture had something to do with art. But architecture’s a tough business. It’s competitive. At the RA, you could slightly rise above that and produce something beautiful. In my practice, Andrew Whalley was one of the first to realise that there was a chance for 300,000 people to see another dimension of architecture.’ Grimshaw became a Royal Academician in 1994, not least because of designing and delivering the Waterloo International terminus. ‘I didn’t know what on earth it meant to be an academician,’ he admits. And his rise to the presidency was organic rather than schemed. ‘It had never crossed my mind. I’d been on the RA Council a bit. Later on, you come up by rotation, a seniority system.’ But presidents have to be picked, and Grimshaw –
whose reformist, politically adept committee-room skills had been noted – was effectively offered the post over a drink in the Arts Club in Dover Street by the outgoing
Left: Financial Times Print Works,1988
Above: British Pavilion, Expo ‘92, Seville, 1992 Above right: Nicholas Grimshaw at the Royal Academy London in 2009 Far right: Superstore for Sainsbury’s, Camden, 1988
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