32 OBITUARY Sir Nicholas Grimshaw


Veronica Simpson reflects on the contribution of Sir Nicholas Grimshaw, one of the Brits who shaped the modern world


MANY GLOWING tributes have emerged to Sir Nicholas Grimshaw since news broke of his death in September. But the most telling quote or comment I have found on this fascinating architect is one of his own, from a ‘legacy’ film made on his retirement, in 2019, and available on the Grimshaw practice’s website: ‘I remember going to quite a recent office building and you could tell that they were trying to intimidate the visitor from the very start. You clip-clopped over a noisy marble floor. Te acoustics were completely non- absorbent, so everything was echo-ey. And by the time you’d signed in and sat in an


immaculate black, leather Mies van der Rohe chair you’d already been crushed. And I don’t think that’s the purpose of architecture, in my view. It should be life-enhancing.’ Compared to his peers and fellow


exponents of ‘high-tech’ architecture of the 1970s and 1880s – Sirs Norman Foster, Richard Rogers or Renzo Piano – you feel Grimshaw always anchored himself in what it is to feel uplifted and delighted, on a human scale, by the buildings and infrastructure he and his firm invented. While Foster, Piano and Rogers have built their names and empires on ever taller, ever more grandiose


Right: Grimshaw never lost sight of who the buildings were for


Left: The practice received the RIBA Stirling Prize last year for its work on designing the generous and streamlined underground elements of the Elizabeth Line


megastructures, Grimshaw never lost sight of who the buildings were for, in the broadest sense. His was a spirit of generosity and plurality, that held true whether he was providing the most elegant window onto (or from) the Eurostar trains that glided through his translucent Waterloo Eurostar terminal, or the plants that would occupy the near miraculous Eden Project’s geodesic domes – a material and structural innovation born of having to build lightly, economically, sustainably and flexibly on uncertain terrain (Cornish claypits) to house delicate organisms under tricky conditions. I was lucky enough to use that first Eurostar


terminal regularly, and it was always with a sense of happy anticipation that one ventured towards Waterloo, knowing that the wait for the train (on wide, daylit platforms, under that arching, transparent roof) would be as pleasurable as the journey itself. Tink, in


PHOTO: HUFTON + CROW


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52  |  Page 53  |  Page 54  |  Page 55  |  Page 56  |  Page 57  |  Page 58  |  Page 59  |  Page 60  |  Page 61  |  Page 62  |  Page 63  |  Page 64  |  Page 65  |  Page 66  |  Page 67  |  Page 68  |  Page 69  |  Page 70  |  Page 71  |  Page 72  |  Page 73  |  Page 74  |  Page 75  |  Page 76  |  Page 77  |  Page 78  |  Page 79  |  Page 80  |  Page 81  |  Page 82  |  Page 83  |  Page 84  |  Page 85  |  Page 86  |  Page 87  |  Page 88  |  Page 89  |  Page 90  |  Page 91  |  Page 92  |  Page 93  |  Page 94  |  Page 95  |  Page 96  |  Page 97  |  Page 98  |  Page 99  |  Page 100  |  Page 101