Nicholas Grimshaw, a British architect who melded his country’s rich history of engineering and industrial design with a modern, high-tech sensibility to produce a stunning portfolio of railway stations, apartment towers, factories and government buildings that helped shape the face of 21st-century Britain, died on Sunday. He was 85.
His firm, Grimshaw, announced his death. The announcement did not say where he died or specify a cause.
Alongside architects like Richard Rogers and Norman Foster, Mr. Grimshaw was a leading figure in the high-tech movement, an outgrowth of Modernism that emphasized the use and display of advanced materials and techniques.
The son of an aeronautical engineer, Mr. Grimshaw drew inspiration from the great British engineers of the 19th century, including Isambard Kingdom Brunel and Joseph Paxton, whose soaring suspension bridges and cavernous iron-and-glass halls helped to visually define the Victorian era.
Mr. Grimshaw sought to do the same for late-20th-century Britain. Advances in steel and composite materials made it possible for him to build swooping spaces like the International Terminal Waterloo in London, which opened in 1994 as the terminus of the Eurostar system linking Britain and continental Europe under the English Channel.
The terminal, with its sinuous, curving glass facade, was hailed at the time as an emblem of a new, optimistic Britain. (Eurostar later moved to St. Pancras station, and today Waterloo is a part of the national rail system.)
The Waterloo project elevated Mr. Grimshaw to the top tier of British architects, and by the early 2000s he was in high demand both at home and abroad, especially for large public projects.
He was perhaps most closely identified with what might be his most idiosyncratic work, the Eden Project. Opened in 2001 in a former china clay quarry in Cornwall, England, it is a collection of domes that enclose vast botanical gardens.
Based on the geodesic designs of the architect Buckminster Fuller, one of Mr. Grimshaw’s idols, the free-standing domes are made of panels of pillowy synthetic foil thin enough to let in light but strong enough to keep out excessive heat and cold.
Mr. Grimshaw did most of his work in Britain and Europe. But in recent decades his firm also worked in Australia, Asia and the United States, particularly in New York, where his firm designed the Fulton Street Transit Center in the financial district (2014); Via Verde, a mixed-use, mixed-income housing complex in the South Bronx (2012); and a renovation and expansion of the Queens Museum (2013).
Although his later work was more explicitly focused on sustainability and adaptability, both themes run through his entire 60-year portfolio.
One of his first designs, done with his partner at the time, Terry Farrell, was 125 Park Road, a 10-story, 40-unit housing development in London that was completed in 1968. The interior is bare-bones, with electrical and plumbing systems running through exposed ductwork and open, loftlike spaces that tenants could customize to their liking. The exterior is wrapped in corrugated aluminum, an inexpensive material that the architects managed to keep from looking cheap.
“People don’t realize what it is that they like about a building, but they do get joy from details,” Mr. Grimshaw told The Independent in 1998. “Somehow, that message gets across. They like the feeling of it. It’s a very subtle thing.”
Nicholas Grimshaw was born on Oct. 9, 1939, in Hove, a town on the English Channel south of London. His father, Thomas, was an aircraft engineer; his mother, Hannah, was a portrait painter. That two-sided parental legacy would push him toward an early interest in architecture.
He studied at the Edinburgh College of Art for three years before being accepted to the prestigious Architectural Association School of Architecture in London.
There he fell under the sway of Peter Cook, a professor who, as a founder of the design collective Archigram, advocated a monumental, hyper-futuristic design aesthetic, a significant influence on the young architect.
After graduating in 1965, Mr. Grimshaw started a firm with Mr. Farrell, his friend and fellow student.
Their first major project, completed in 1967, was a service tower attached to a student housing complex in London. When the client asked them to pack it with as many bathrooms as possible, with easy access for students on different levels, they hit on a low-cost, innovative solution: an enclosed helical ramp, lined on the inside with bathrooms.
The design was so unusual that no contractor would take it on. So Mr. Grimshaw oversaw the project himself, supervising a shifting team of carpenters, plumbers and electricians.
“The service tower made me feel how much I loved construction,” he said in a video found on his firm’s website. “It’s some sort of a cross between mechanical engineering, sculpture and rocket science.”
Mr. Grimshaw married Lavinia Russell in 1972. She survives him, along with their daughters, Chloe and Isabel Grimshaw, and several grandchildren.
Although Mr. Farrell grew increasingly interested in the neo-traditional styles of the postmodern movement, Mr. Grimshaw remained fixed in his commitment to functional, high-tech design. The two split in 1980, and Mr. Grimshaw started his own firm, Nicholas Grimshaw & Partners (now simply Grimshaw).
Among his other significant early works were a printing facility for The Financial Times, in the then-decrepit Docklands area of London (1988); a branch of the Sainsbury’s supermarket chain in London’s Camden neighborhood (1988); and an ice rink in Oxford (1984).
By the early 2000s, Mr. Grimshaw’s firm was international in scale. While its focus remained on Britain, its commissions included the airport in Zurich (2004); the Enneüs Heerma Bridge in Amsterdam (2001); and Horno³: Museo del Acero, a former steel plant converted into a cultural facility in Monterrey, Mexico (2007).
Mr. Grimshaw took time away from his firm in 2004 to serve as president of the Royal Academy of Arts. He left his academy position in 2011 and formally retired from his firm in 2019, but he remained involved as an adviser on projects like the Elizabeth subway line in London, which opened in 2022.
Among his final endeavors was a project that embodied his commitment to innovative, sustainable design.
In 1976, he and Mr. Farrell had built a factory for Herman Miller, the furniture company, in Bath, England. At the time, it won praise for its flexible, spacious interiors.
Eventually Herman Miller left the factory, but Mr. Grimshaw wasn’t done. After the Bath School of Art and the Bath School of Design took it over, they commissioned him to remake it as an academic center. The renovated building opened in 2019.
“I’m getting more and more impassioned with sustainability,” he told The Financial Times in 2019. “Architects should be compelled to put in proposals for how their buildings could be converted later, from offices to flats for instance. We need to stop looking at buildings as expensive handbags on shelves.”
Clay Risen is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.
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