This is one reason that makes the Design Museum a good venue for the Grimshaw exhibition, which is essentially Grimshaw since Waterloo, and is the first retrospective on the practice since 1988. As is the typically designerly exhibition concept of illuminated display cases that fold down into aluminium flight boxes for touring purposes. Not to mention the fact that the museum also has a show on Grimshaw's hero, the American designer-inventor Buckminster Fuller, without whom the geodesic domes of the Eden Project would not have been possible. I'll declare an interest: the exhibition, titled "Equilibrium", is loosely based on a recently-published book of mine, with that title, on Grimshaw. I've also been involved to some extent in the planning of the show. So turn the page now if you think I'm just shifting stock here. Or stay with me, and I'll try to explain how Grimshaw and his band square the circle of being both extremely modern, and thoroughly popular.
L to R: Harriss, Nash, Grimshaw, Sidor and Whalley
He is in fact five men - his partners, all from a younger generation, are David Harriss, Chris Nash, Neven Sidor and Andrew Whalley - and around 120 staff in all. OK, so this is not in the same size league as Norman Foster's famously gargantuan office, but it's certainly on a par with Richard Rogers'. Yet despite the scale of the operation, it was not really until the latest crop of super-league projects that Grimshaw's name began to be widely known. He is a reticent man, not involved in politics like Rogers. Nor yet has he become a public figure like Foster. He prefers to sit in his studio and get on with the business of pushing the boundaries forward. He has an obsession for detail. He and his partners have been known to spend insane amounts of time determining the relative sizes of a bolt and its washer. The downside of this is that, sometimes, his buildings can get over-elaborate.
One of his most spectacular projects to date is the latest manifestation of one of the things he's always been good at: the supershed. But whereas, in the early days, these were good-looking, bargain-basement factories and warehouses, the £80m competition-winning double-decker Frankfurt "Messehalle" or exhibition hall, now being built, is in a different league. If you've got to enclose a huge space beneath a huge roof, Grimshaw reasoned, then you might as well make that roof an interesting one. So he makes it arch lengthwise - 525 feet from end to end - instead of doing it the easy way, from side to side. Then, so as not to make it all too high, he and his partner Neven Sidor devised an original "folded plate" structure for the roof, which is a bit like a lot of canoes all joined together. It could well be largest clear-span, column-free covered space in Europe when it is finished next year. Nick's not sure. He didn't set out to break any records, but it seems he might have done so, all the same.
Frankfurt Messehalle
