contrast, of the typical wait in the subterranean- feeling, cramped and unglamorous departure lounge at St Pancras International. According to architecture critic Hugh


Pearman, the Eurostar’s glazed, curved and tapering 400m trainshed was Grimshaw’s favourite building. It borrowed from the inspirational, expressed engineering of Grimshaw’s hero Isambard Kingdom Brunel, but steered it in a whole new, more organic and contemporary direction. Completed in 1993, it is the building that launched Grimshaw as an international architect of note. And yet, unlike his peers, he never became a ‘starchitect’ – someone who stamps their architectural style and ego across every project, regardless of how appropriate or contextually relevant it is, and often in formulaic/generic, off-the-peg iterations. Born in Hove, his father was an aircraft engineer and his mother an artist: a parental


DNA that no doubt informed his desire for buildings that have a vital spark of humanity, of joy, while also expressing their intrinsic, structural genius – ‘good bones’ as he called them. Emerging from the Architecture Association (AA) in the 1960s, where he studied under Sir Peter Cook, Cedric Price and John Winter, he teamed up in 1965 with fellow AA graduate Terry Farrell for their


Unlike his peers, Grimshaw never


became a ‘starchitect’ – someone who stamps their architectural style and ego across every project


first, joint practice, but parted company after 15 years over ‘creative differences’. Farrell was itching to party with the postmodernists. Grimshaw felt that style and ornament should not override purpose or ‘the beauty of the way things go together’. Tere was more mileage to be had from his


industrially inspired, component-based architecture; an ethos that underpinned the affordable, adaptable and often award-winning structures the pair had designed together. For the student hostel in Bayswater, retrofitting a terrace of Victorian houses, Grimshaw designed a plug-in ‘service tower’ of steel, glass and prefabricated GRP, to house a spiralling ramp of modular bathroom pods; it kept the refurbishment costs down and also ensured that no student would ever be left waiting for a shower. ‘I built it like a giant piece of Meccano,’ he said. ‘Somewhere between mechanical engineering, sculpture and rocket science.’


PHOTO: RICK ROXBURGH


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