Grimshaw's Battersea

Now, with the geodesic bubbles of Eden well under way, Grimshaw is getting into gear on Battersea. "The scale of the power station is extraordinary - far bigger than the Tate Modern at Bankside," he says. "It is a symbol of heroic industry, a noble structure, and we don't want to do anything that would downgrade that heroic feel. So we're not going to turn it into a funfair. Everyone involved in the project is extremely anti-Disney."

Central to the plans is a big theatre for the Montreal-based art-circus company Cirque du Soleil. Grimshaw also feels that it would lend itself to grand opera, while other spaces in the huge complex could show contemporary art (there are unconfirmed rumours of negotiations with America's Guggenheim Museum). Although it will be an entertainment centre - with cinemas, restaurants, shops and one "white knuckle" ride in one of the chimneys - he sees it as anything but frivolous. In this he is supported by the other designers involved on the 26 acre site. Masterminding the designs is Sir Philip Dowson, architect and former president of the Royal Academy. A big housing development on the land beside the power station is to be by Benson and Forsyth, architects of the acclaimed Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh. A crescent-shaped hotel on the western side of the site is by Dowson's old firm, Arup Associates. The Battersea project has changed enormously since the mid 1980s, when the Alton Towers entrepreneur John Broome started work turning it into a giant theme park - but ran out of money and sold up.

Even so, Grimshaw dismisses Sir Terence Conran's idea, published in The Times on Wednesday, that Battersea should be turned into a colossal design centre. "I think that's a bit cheeky," Grimshaw observes. "Battersea is not the kind of building you want to look at Russell Hobbs kettles in."

You can see his point. Unlike the smaller Tate Modern, a former power station with very little land round it, Battersea is a wholly commercial venture and a very large one - costs are estimated at between £500m and £800m for the whole site, as opposed to £134m for the Tate. This is large-scale private sector regeneration, and it has to turn a profit.