Nicholas Grimshaw (1939–2025) was an English architect and one of the pioneers of high-tech architecture, best known for Waterloo International railway station and the Eden Project. He named the 19th-century engineers Joseph Paxton and Isambard Kingdom Brunel among his influences, alongside Buckminster Fuller and Charles and Ray Eames. He was president of the Royal Academy from 2004 to 2011 and was knighted.
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Waterloo International in London (1993), the terminal for trains to mainland Europe, was named RIBA President's Building of the Year in 1994. The Eden Project in Cornwall (2001), built in a reclaimed china clay pit, grows rainforest and Mediterranean plants inside biomes of hexagonal and pentagonal ETFE cushions on geodesic steel domes, a clear debt to Fuller. The National Space Centre in Leicester (2001) houses upright rockets in a 42-metre tower clad in the same inflated ETFE. Southern Cross Station in Melbourne (2006) continued his practice's work on large stations. Nicholas Grimshaw's projects are studied for lightweight structure and the engineering of large spans.
