Architecture industry and innovation grimshaw: 0000: v.2 (Architecture, Industry and Innovation: Work of Nicholas Grimshaw and Partners, 1965-1988) - Tapa dura

Nicholas Grimshaw is ranked alongside Sir Norman Foster and Sir Richard Rogers as a leading figure of the high-tech movement in British architecture in the last decade. The period 1965-1988 established his reputation worldwide as an architect of subtlety. Grinshaw has applied himself to an unbroken line of development on the course he set himself at the Architectural Association in the mid-1960s. He produced in 1967, a helical service tower with 30 glass-fibre bathroom pods as a way to upgrade a row of listed Victorian houses for students, and also produced the bowsprung fabric end walls of the British Pavilion at Expo 1992 in Seville. Grimshaw is also the architect of the 1972 Citroen warehouse at Runnymede, and proceeded through a factory and distribution centre for Herman Miller to the latest building in that particular line, the Igus factory outside Cologne with its chameleon-eye rooflights and yellow suspension masts. He designed the aluminium-clad Park Road apartment tower of 1968 with its twin double-height rooftop apartments (where Grimshaw lived for some years) and the aluminium-clad canalside Camden terrace houses of 1989 with their double-height living spaces. Grimshaw buildings show a slow and steady evolution.

Colin Amery is the architecture correspondent of the Financial Times.