The practice is now fully fledged: it can draw fruitfully on its years of research, development, and outright experimentation, has developed finely-honed responses to a wide range of conditions. It has achieved a sense of equilibrium: a state of poise resulting from an even balance of energies. Maintaining this is an active and dynamic process. This is a practice fully aware of its own future, with a younger generation of four directors - David Harriss, Chris Nash, Neven Sidor and Andrew Whalley - taking forward the Grimshaw approach. The new projects in this volume - the commissions won since the completion of the celebrated Waterloo International Terminal in 1992 - show how that approach and aesthetic are developing in this collaborative environment.

A number of breakthroughs are recorded here. These include the practice's first art gallery, for the Caixa Galicia in Spain; its first bridge, at Ijburg in the Netherlands; its first City of London office building; its first Berlin and American buildings; its first university faculty, at Surrey University; its first private house, in Germany; its first commercial foray into pure product design, the Profile One office orientation system for Mabeg; and its first sports grandstand, at Lord's Cricket Ground. There is steadily more ambitious airport work, from Heathrow and Manchester to Zurich. And there is a roster of landmark UK Millennium projects of greatly differing scales and uses: a wave of essentially publicly-funded landmark schemes of an ambition not seen for decades.

In addition there is a handful of unbuilt projects of significance to the evolving work of the practice, among them the Victoria and Albert Museum extension, the Pusan Bay transport interchange in Korea, and the British embassy in Berlin. This growth of work, both typologically and geographically, creates its own momentum. At the time of writing, the Grimshaw office employs 120 people, which is big for a fully-computerised European architecture firm. It is unusual in having a semi-autonomous product design division, run by Duncan Jackson and Eoin Billings, who have a big input into the design of the componentry of NGP buildings. Numbers alone are meaningless, however: more important is the atmosphere of the place. The practice headquarters in Conway Street, London, does not feel like the nerve centre of a large international practice. It is the same building, down a side street in a corner of Fitzrovia, that the firm has occupied for years. Space is now at a premium, a nearby annexe has been brought into use, the ground floor and basement have been re-planned, but this is still the same building, with its aluminium staircase supported on modified yacht masts, that you associate with Grimshaw's when it was a much smaller concern.