Nicholas Grimshaw

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 14 December 2003

⏱️ 36 minutes

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Summary

This week Sue Lawley's castaway is the architect Sir Nicholas Grimshaw. An interest in engineering runs in the Grimshaw genes - one great-grandfather was responsible for seeing a proper drainage and sanitation system installed in Dublin, while another built dams in Egypt. Nicholas inherited an enormous Meccano set and showed an early interest in construction - his passions were building tree houses and boats. One of his nicknames is 'Meccano man' because of his designs with exposed steel supports.

In the past 12 years his work has become more widely known and includes the International Terminal at Waterloo, the British Pavilion, for Seville's Expo '92 and, most significantly, the Eden Project. He's just finished the redevelopment of the Roman Baths at Bath and is now working on Battersea Power Station.

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

Favourite track: Prelude to Cello Suite No.4 by Johann Sebastian Bach Book: The complete works by Patrick O'Brien Luxury: RIBA drawings collection

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, I'm Krestey Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.
0:05.0	For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.
0:08.0	The program was originally broadcast in 2003, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My cast away this week is an architect. He set up his own practice as soon as he graduated
0:34.2	from college and has never worked for anyone else. The fruits of this single-mindedness can
0:38.8	be seen all over the world. From a New York subway station to the Berlin Stock Exchange to the Eurostar Terminal at Waterloo
0:46.0	and the Eden Project in Cornwall.
0:48.0	As befits a man whose father was an engineer and mother a portrait painter, his buildings are a marriage between mathematical
0:55.9	functionalism and intense creativity. He is determined to be practical, but he wants them to be
1:02.2	elegant and beautiful too.
1:04.0	I defend them all, he says.
1:06.0	There isn't one, I'm not really proud of.
1:08.0	He is Sir Nicholas Grimshaw.
1:10.0	You make them sound, Nick, like children, your offspring. Is that how you think of them?
1:16.3	Well, certainly the process of designing a building is very much like sort of bringing up
1:21.9	a child, I think. and there is a point when somehow
1:24.8	they leave home and you have to let them have their own life. But do you then go
1:29.6	out and sort of check they're all right, tend to them or do you just leave them to do their own thing?
1:34.0	Yes, I mean I always think in some ways architects are shy of talking about beauty, but you will find
1:41.9	me sometimes standing at night looking at one of my buildings and
1:46.8	enjoying it.
1:48.4	If you think you've got something right, there is a huge satisfaction in going back and looking at it and saying, well, not bad.
1:57.0	Having that confirmed. The latest one on your drawing board, I gather, is Battersea Power Station that sort of great lump of an upturned Victorian table just on the other side of Chelsea Bridge.
	...

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