Nicholas Grimshaw

Early life and education Nicholas Grimshaw was born in Hove, East Sussex, on 9 October 1939. One of his great-grandfathers was a civil engineer who built dams in Egypt, and another (Thomas Wrigley Grimshaw) was a physician who campaigned for the installation of Dublin's drainage and sanitation system after showing a link between waterborne diseases and streams joining the River Liffey.

The artist John Atkinson Grimshaw was another of his ancestors.

Grimshaw's father died when he was two, and he grew up with his mother, a grandmother who was also a painter, and two sisters in Guildford.

Grimshaw was educated at Wellington College in Berkshire. While at the AA, he was influenced by professor Peter Cook, one of the founders of Archigram. 1994 also saw him elected a vice-chairman of the Architectural Association, a member of the Royal Academy The work of Nicholas Grimshaw & Partners was the subject of a series of monographs published by Phaidon Press: Architecture, Industry and Innovation deals with the years 1965–1988; Structure, Space and Skin covers 1988–1993; and Equilibrium looks at work up until 2000.

In December 2004, Grimshaw was elected president of the Royal Academy of Arts, a position he held until 2011. In 2019, Andrew Whalley succeeded Grimshaw as chairman of Grimshaw Architects.

Style Grimshaw was considered one of the pioneers of high-tech architecture, which grew out of the modernist movement.

Grimshaw cited 19th-century architects Joseph Paxton and Isambard Kingdom Brunel as influences, Fuller's influence on Grimshaw is visible in the geodesic domes of the Eden Project,

Personal life and death In 1972, Grimshaw married Lavinia Russell, an expert on Chinese culture and the daughter of art critic John Russell and Countess Alexandrine Apponyi. Nicholas and Lavinia Grimshaw went on to have two daughters, both born in the 1970s.

Nicholas Grimshaw died on 14 September 2025, at the age of 85.

Projects

Projects include:

125 Park Road, London (1970); joint project with Terry Farrell Herman Miller Factory, Bath (1976); joint project with Terry Farrell Financial Times Printworks, Blackwall, London (1988) Rank Xerox Research Centre, Welwyn Garden City (1988) Sainsbury's supermarket, Camden Town, London (1988) Stockbridge Leisure Centre, Liverpool (1988) British Pavilion Expo '92, Seville, Spain (1992) Waterloo International railway station, London (1993) Compass Centre, Heathrow Airport (1993) South West Media Group (Western Morning News, Plymouth Herald) Headquarters and Printworks. Known as "The Ship", Derriford, Plymouth (1993) RAC Regional Headquarters, Bristol (1994) Pier 4A, Heathrow Airport (1993) Berlin Stock Exchange (Ludwig Erhard Haus), Berlin, Germany (1998) Lord's Cricket Ground Grandstand, London (1998) Paddington station redevelopment, London (1999) National Space Centre, Leicester (2001) Eco Hotel Concept, United States (2011) Cutty Sark conservation project, London, England (2012) He received the RIBA Royal Gold Medal in 2019.