34 OBITUARY
Right: Grimshaw’s reinvention of London Bridge
Left: The Eden Project is one of South West England’s premier tourist attractions
Left (middle and bottom): The practice created innovative further education buildings in New York, including the EMPAC
Farrell Grimshaw also built a now listed
ten-storey co-housing apartment block, using corrugated aluminium cladding, overlooking Regents Park, to house ten families, including – for a time – their own. A testament to the success of Grimshaw’s
projects is that they have (mostly) not just endured – the Eden Project has to be one of few Landmark Millennium schemes to have survived the economic turbulence of the past two and a half decades and remains one of South West England’s premier tourist attractions – but adapted. His celebrated Financial Times printworks – a Cedric Price ‘fun-house’ for newspapers, the full glory of their machinery, their printing and production visible for miles around – is now listed, and used as a server-farm. The award-winning Herman Miller furniture factory in Chippenham, in his words ‘a steel frame with an interchangeable external skin of fibreglass panels’, is now a free-flowing, daylit college for several departments of Bath
Spa University, retrofitted and refurbished by the practice.
While these days his peers may trumpet their passion for sustainability, his preoccupation with caring about buildings while not destroying the planet is evident not just in the Eden Project but flagged up by his Expo Pavilion for Seville, in 1992. Sited in Europe’s hottest city, where other pavilions were kept bearable only thanks to energy- guzzling air-con units, his was cooled by waterfalls cascading down a glass wall, and powered by PV panels. Grimshaw was certainly ambitious. He
undertook all the necessary training and exams to be able to work in the US without having to hitch himself to a local architecture firm. He set up office in New York, where the practice quickly made a name for innovative further education buildings, including the EMPAC (Experimental Media and Performing Arts Centre) at Troy in upstate New York; its ‘timber egg in a glass box’ trope has been
PHOTOS: PETER AARON, HUFTON + CROW
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