Reflections

摘要

Sir Nicholas Grimshaw has always demonstrated three things - beyond a highly developed aesthetic sense - that are necessary to make good architecture. First, you need to understand your materials, your components, how they are made, how they behave. Second, don't close down options for a building's future: allow maximum flexibility and clear space. Finally, you need to take time. Not in the sense of 'slow architecture' - his buildings have often if not always been designed for rapid construction - but in the sense of the practitioner needing to gain experience. 'It's difficult, architecture,' he once told me. 'It takes a long time to really feel confident about it. I think I'm beginning to understand it now.' That was at the start of the 1990s, which was to prove a breakthrough decade for him and his firm.