The craftsman's keyboard.

Meticulous and inventive detailing has always defined a Grimshaw building; the practice has a history of designing components that explore the potential of materials and technology.

The painstakingly crafted detail has always been the essence of a Grimshaw building. Standard components are often rejected in favour of purpose-made ones: over the years, for instance, the practice has evolved dozens of ways of fixing structural glass in all its permutations, often with the use of special castings. Complete cladding systems have been designed for individual buildings, and products arising from a particular building -- such as the housings for the gas-plasma information screens at Paddington Station in London -- can prove to have a life elsewhere. As importantly, individual products are designed that stand alone from NGP's building commissions: the practice is rare in sustaining a complete, semi-autonomous industrial design unit.

It is not unusual for a leading architect to find a commission for a product -- a piece of furniture, say, or a door handle -- leading from the design of a building. What is more unusual is for the building to follow on from the product. This is what happened with one of NGP's German clients, Mabeg. First came the commission for a kit-of-parts signage and orientation system, Profile One. Second came the flagship building at the company's factory at Soest, along with a masterplan for the phased redevelopment of the whole site. Naturally the Profile One system is used extensively for the Mabeg interior. Equally, its flexibility is demonstrated by the way NGP has used it to construct the reception area of its own Conway Street offices in London. Later, more design cross-talk occurred. NGP used Mabeg components in its Fusion exhibition display, where the whole exhibition opens up out of modified aluminium flight boxes, complete with lighting. Mabeg consequently adopted the idea to launch a flexible exhibition di splay system, Profile One Mobile. The idea is satisfyingly simple: the packaging for the exhibition as it travels simply converts into the display medium upon arrival, a classic example of the Grimshaw policy to make each component perform several tasks at once. In similar vein, a system of components for bus stops designed for the Spanish company Cemusa has proved adaptable enough to be assembled into a complete bus station.

Of course there is a Modernist paradox here, one that has been with us since the Arts and Crafts era, reinforced by the Bauhaus. Mass production and high levels of craft detail do not usually go together, any more than low-budget buildings are tolerant of too many non-standard details. Besides, neither architects nor their clients tend to want a building that is exactly the same as another. How to square this circle? Perhaps surprisingly architects at NGP increasingly find themselves in the position of craftsfolk: the latest technology means that they can not only design, but actually make, the special component.

The practice was one of the few in the UK to computerize its entire office in one strike (as opposed to gradually introducing terminals here and there). Drawings for the 1988 Sainsbury's superstore in Camden are in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London because they represent the last NGP project to be designed principally by hand. Naturally, rough pencil sketches remain important for early concept work, but the practice's wholehearted espousal of the possibilities of computing has led to dramatic effects on the form of its buildings. The first to show the effects significantly was undoubtedly Waterloo International Station: and, deriving in one way from that, the sinuous form of Ludwig Erhard Haus in Berlin, where a series of box-girder hoops of precisely calculated and individually varying dimensions had to be designed to hang the floors of the building from. Cladding and glazing this complex shape was also something that would have been almost insuperably difficult before the arrival o f the computer-generated special shape.

In its most recent buildings, this approach has paid dividends. A low cost university faculty building such as Surrey University's European Institute of Health and Medical Sciences (EIHMS) would not previously have been able to receive much more than a standard enclosure. As designed, the triangular plan of the building and its distinctive flaring nose-cone necessitated apparently tricky shaping of roof and cladding panels in both metal sheeting and exposed timber. But the hyperbolic paraboloid geometry employed made it possible to computer-design and manufacture the various shapes needed at low cost. Similar techniques make the complex folded-plate roof form of the new Frankfurt Messehalle economically viable. Despite the fact that the twisting geometry repeats four times across the roof, 60 different shapes are needed for the roof cladding and its timber-lined soffit, but now, the architect can set the template for the manufacturers to use directly.

This new approach can be seen in action at the Eden Project in Cornwall, where despite the high degree of standardization of the hexagonal modules of the geodesic structures, special shapes are needed to take up irregularities in the ground contours of the former claypit site, and at the points of intersection of the domes. Previously economics might have dictated more extensive ground-levelling and separate, rather than intersecting, glasshouses. This technology, in a typically Eden gesture, is contrasted with the very ancient technique of rammed-earth wall construction employed as a heat regulator in the back wall of the visitor centre overlooking the main buildings. The direct moulding of structure, whether earth, concrete or more advanced materials, is a time-honoured and valid way to achieve a special shape with a standard product Unlike computer-driven manufacture, however, it remains relatively labour-intensive.

It has become commonplace that new architectural forms have been made possible by technology transfer from the aerospace and maritime industries. Whereas in the recent past this might have extended little further than a sharing of modified components -- for instance the central staircase in the Grimshaw office, which is supported on aluminium yacht masts -- today it is as likely to be the computer programs used in those industries. When the practice came to design a station for Germany's superfast, friction-free Berlin-Hamburg 'Maglev' trains (a project since cancelled by the German government), the building was more overtly vehicular inform than any previous NGP project. To build it would have required vehicular design techniques.

There is now the feeling in the practice that, far from removing the architect from the craft aspects of construction, the computer is bringing them considerably closer. It is possible for the architect not just to design but to make a component directly, by on-line link between the studio and the factory. It is more than merely designing by hand. The potential of such new techniques is only starting to be explored.