Nicholas grimshaw & partners.

This supplement to The Architectural Review accompanies and celebrates an exhibition of the recent work of Nicholas Grimshaw & Partners, which will first be shown at the Design Museum, London between 15 September and 8 October, after which it will travel.

From his earliest days, Nick Grimshaw has been fascinated by the potential of technology. In the early '60s, I remember him at the Edinburgh College of Art designing a hyperbolic paraboloid roof (old hat now, but then at the forefront of technological progress) much to the consternation of the staff and the admiration of fellow students. We were even more awed when he moved to the Architectural Association School in London, which was then a hotbed of architectural ideas.

Unlike some of his teachers from the Archigram Group, Grimshaw clearly always wanted to build. Once he had set up on his own, it was clear that he was passionate about making things properly, continuing the English tradition of truthful and precise construction that goes back to Pugin and his descendants in the Arts and Crafts Movement and, simultaneously, to the example of the great Victorian glass and iron buildings. But in Grimshaw's work, these sensibilities are transformed by Archigrams radical vision of the potential of increasingly fecund technology, the possibilities of transfer of technique from one discipline to another, and continuous rigorous analysis of how to use such new ideas economically and efficiently to serve humanity.

As the practice evolved, it quickly became clear that Grimshaw and his colleagues were extremely good at big sheds, or what Hugh Pearman calls (p4) 'designing the maximum enclosed area with maximum efficiency'. This programme in itself produced some memorable buildings, ranging from the Herman Miller Factory, Bath, to the British pavilion at Seville (AR June 1992). And, of course, that magnificent, sinuous and luminous apotheosis of the Victorian station, the Waterloo terminal of the Channel Tunnel trains (AR September 1993), which is wound ingeniously into the crowded centre of the great multi-layered web of the British capital.

Gradually, the work has matured, with new considerations adding to initial functional preoccupations. The Sainsbury supermarket in London's Camden Town for instance (AR October 1989) used all the finespun, shell-making experience of the practice, but at the same time related the huge bulk of the building to the scale of the nineteenth-century domestic context, without in the least descending to picturesque scene painting. The Western Morning News building on the edge of Plymouth and the great moor beyond it (AR June 1993), introduced a notion of symbolism, with a boat-like prow pointing toward the hinterland, evoking equally the city's nautical heritage, and the company's commitment to its environs. It also has a central multi-level communal space, an exploration of semi-public space.

In Berlin, the Ludwig Erhard Haus (AR January 1999) combines almost all the Grimshaw firm's present preoccupations: its arched structure is intended to make maximum usable space on a tight site; its delicate glass front on Fasanenstra[beta]e relates to the scale of the prim nineteenth-century thoroughfare; its generous semi-public spaces have become remarkably popular for private and public parties (p22). And, of course, throughout, the creative analysis of techne -- tectonics and technology -- continues with great rigour.

Rigour is continuously extended. NGP is one of the few contemporary architectural practices that has the opportunity -- and initiative -- to attempt the late-nineteenth-century challenge of the Gezomtkunstwerk, the total work of art. Industrial design is approached with the same fastidiousness as the buildings -- and furniture, for both buildings and streets, has become an important part of the output. At the same time, the firm's range of materials has been greatly extended. Added to the basic palette of metal, glass, fabrics and plastic, are wood, stone (for Bath Spa, p14) and even rammed earth (at the visitor centre at Eden in Cornwall, p9). Warmer, more sensuous buildings are emerging.

The firm continues to grow in its range and understanding of techne, of the urban condition -- and, most importantly, of people. So this supplement, written by Hugh Pearman, is necessarily an interim report, which besides celebrating achievement, offers great hope for the future.