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One sought the next wonder of the world and achieved it,” declared Tim Smit, creator of the iconic conservatories conceived by Nicholas Grimshaw, who has died at 85. Within a Cornish pit, a cluster of spherical structures looking like monumental soap bubbles enclose conservatories housing luxuriant plant environments. Finished in 2000, it was among Grimshaw’s most ambitious and innovative projects, almost springing from the mind of a science fiction novelist rather than an architect.

Structural Excellence and Traditional Influence

Yet despite how excitingly futuristic Grimshaw’s structures looked, they were anchored by an avid interest in engineering and artisanship, and how historic precedents could be reimagined and adjusted for the contemporary age. In place of using glass for the Eden Project’s domes, Grimshaw opted for gossamer-light foil cushions.

Reimagining Train Stations

When passenger rail services through the Channel tunnel first began operating in 1994, the British end was signaled by a new global gateway at London’s Waterloo Station. Grimshaw conjured a innovative reinterpretation of the Victorian iron and glass train shed that his predecessors would readily recognise. The concept for the roof’s irregular arched form, a design feat made all the more intricate by being curved on plan, was the framework of a human hand. Expertly connected to accommodate the movement imposed by trains, a glazed roof vault enveloped platforms in a elegantly transparent cocoon. Underneath, a sleek, modern-terminal-like concourse guided passengers up to the platform.

Though it endured a abandoned period after Eurostar switched its operations to St Pancras in 2007, it has since been integrated back into the main station as part of a significant refurbishment, so that travelers heading for the suburban areas can feel the same thrill as those first Paris-bound adventurers.

Enhancing Common Locales

Hi-tech architecture was often designed to appear at its best in a industrial, empty state, but Grimshaw’s output of stations, airports, trade fair halls, sports complexes and even the unusual supermarket, improved and enhanced the everyday experience of commuting or retail therapy.

Partly aircraft carrier, part aircraft hangar, Sainsbury’s Camden large store (1988) was a strong, steel structure that brought a touch of Mad Max to the weekly shop. Grimshaw even designed a new kind of sloped moving walkway that secured shopping trolleys to convey customers down to the basement car park. It was typical of his attention to detail and trust in technology to tackle the most everyday of problems.

Standout Designs

Early remarkable projects included Oxford Ice Rink (1984), a audacious, open-plan structure hung by a web of cables from two towering masts and clad in silver panels more typically used in cold stores. The Financial Times print works (1988) invigorated a uninspiring part of London’s terraforming Docklands by putting the ballet mécanique of newspaper production on display inside an immaculately engineered glass box. Pedestrians could watch the FT emerge each day in a Rube Goldberg-esque display of whirring machinery and pink newsprint.

Worldwide and Adaptable Architecture

Commissioned to design the British Pavilion for the 1992 Seville Expo, Grimshaw created an graceful, interchangeable structure crowned by a rippling crest of solar panels. These provided the energy to power a wall of water which lowered the temperature the pavilion and its visitors in Seville’s searing summer heat. The headquarters for the Western Morning News (1993) was conceived as a futuristic ship in full sail on a slope outside Plymouth, while in Berlin, the Ludwig Erhard Haus (1998), designed to host the unified city’s Chamber of Commerce, was suspended from a arched structure of curved steel arches, hoisted into position as spectacularly as the timber frames of a medieval barn.

Impact in Urban Design

Railway stations were a frequent theme. After the success of Waterloo, Grimshaw went on to renew London’s Paddington (1999), stripping away layered accretions to uncover the engineering puissance of Isambard Kingdom Brunel. In later years, towards the end of his career, his firm was given the monumental task of sorting out London Bridge, once described by John Betjeman as “the most complicated, muddled and inhospitable of all London termini”. Where there was dullness and disorder there is now clarity and connection, expressed in a spacious new concourse and a symphony of escalators and lifts. Even Betjeman might be able to navigate.

Flexible Architecture for Evolving Needs

Another much larger London infrastructure project, the Elizabeth Line, won last year’s RIBA Stirling prize, shared with design team collaborators Maynard, Equation and AtkinsRéalis. “Going down into the enormous network of tunnels feels like accessing a gateway to the future, where the usual commuter disorder is converted into an effortless experience,” said RIBA president Muyiwa Oki.

Grimshaw was always eager to point out that technology progresses and circumstances change, but the trick is to produce architecture that is agile and versatile. This was perhaps most effectively demonstrated by the successful 2019 remodelling of the Herman Miller furniture factory to accommodate the Bath Schools of Art and Design. Initially completed in 1976, when Grimshaw was in collaboration with Terry Farrell, the quintessential polished industrial shed is now another kind of factory, an incubator for the methods of creation, making, experimentation and learning, showing that buildings could – and should – have renewed relevance.