It has been a week of wonders for Grimshaw. He has just won a fiercely-fought architectural competition to build an ultra-modern extension for the Royal College of Art, right next to the Royal Albert Hall. And the day before Battersea's owners revealed their plans - with an immense all-new glass and steel Grimshaw building, including a 2,500 seat theatre, dropped into the great hall at the heart of the former power station - another of his landmark projects was revealed. The Eden Project in Cornwall is an £80m Lottery-funded complex of botanical domes being built - like a beautiful space city - in a landscaped former china clay quarry near St. Austell. It is the brainchild of Tim Smit, creator of the wildly successful "Lost Gardens of Heligan" nearby.

Eden will not be complete for another year - but as soon as Smit opened his Grimshaw-designed visitor centre last Monday (May 15), the crowds came pouring in, happy to pay £3 just to gaze at the extraordinary giant intersecting bubbles being constructed in the quarry below, and then to spend more money in the cafe and shop. Smit now estimates he may now get as many as a quarter of a million paying visitors before those bubbles - strictly climatic "biomes", one of which will house a tropical rainforest - open next spring.

Smit at the Eden Project