Architecture: The trick is to think small

Nick Grimshaw thinks details are important, and his approach has proved a big hit on buildings in cities around the world. His latest exhibition gives an insight into the tools and processes that make fine, and functional, designs. By Nonie Niesewand

Just as you thought Britain didn't make anything any more, two exhibitions have opened in London to show the world that industrial design is crucial to new British architecture. Architects are joined at the hip - and the roof hip - to industrial designers who customise their buildings with factory-cast components.

The recently appointed professor of industrial design at the RCA, Ron Arad, looks to the aircraft industry to vacuum-mould his architectonic furniture, fireplaces, and pod-like houses in an exhibition entitled Ron Arad. And at Fusion in the Victorian pumping-station at Wapping, Nick Grimshaw shows us the nuts and bolts of his buildings. He chose the title because, as simply as "le weekend", fusion means the same thing in several European languages. It also represents the seamless union between architecture and industrial design.

"The aim of this exhibition is to encourage people to look at the details of a building. The details count," Nicholas Grimshaw believes. "Bland and unsatisfying buildings leave you with the feeling that the architect has just walked away. It isn't really a question of money. It's the need to understand the way that things are made."

God is in the details, as Mies van der Rohe once piously observed. In his buttoned-up British way, Nick Grimshaw agrees: "People don't realise what it is that they like about a building, but they do get joy from details. Somehow, that message gets across. They like the feeling of it. It's a very subtle thing."

In a Grimshaw glass box, the details have to work a lot harder than mere accents. They are the entire building. The running water that cloaked the glass facade of the British Pavilion at Expo 92 in Seville, the canvas sails draped along the wrap-around glass on the Western Morning News building in Plymouth, even the tarpaulins that shroud the passenger platforms at strategic points along the Eurostar Terminus at Waterloo, do not hide the fact that the bits below the glass, like sinew and muscle, hold the skin. It's unforgiving. The engineer Frank Newby cruelly described hi- tech as "the use of tortured structure for decorative purposes". There is nothing tortured - or decorative - about the natty little trusses, clips, joists, clamps and tusks. Captain Queeg would have had difficulty fitting them in his pocket, yet the skeleton supports of every Grimshaw building are surprisingly small.

Britain's best-known hi-tech architect hates the label - "It's so American" - almost as much as its fashionable replacement, eco-tech. His Western Morning News building illustrates the cover of Eco Tech by Catherine Slessor, who argues that "a new generation of buildings expands the vocab and evolves an architecture with different aims, the most significant of which is sustainable architecture".

Going green is at the heart and Grimshaw is sensitive to it. "By 2020, aluminium won't be mined anywhere in the world," he predicts. "It's a recyclable material. There will be enough for constant remoulding and it would be a great waste not to use it." Unlike brick. New bricks take a lot of energy to manufacture, and old bricks can't be recycled, since Imperial measurements don't fit metric floor plans. So the backdrop to Fusion, the cavernous hydraulic pumping-station at Wapping, is pertinent. Here the Victorians harnessed the Thames to operate hydraulic lifts. Now the chunky machines are silenced and obsolete but Grimshaw, who is converting the space for the Women's Playhouse, will leave those dinosaurs of another age. "I like them," he says, recalling that the Victorians made bolt- on prefab modular masonry units, windowsills and doorways in brick, a mass production that stopped with the First World War.

"In the 19th century you used individual craftsmanship to produce moulds. Now, craftsmanship at the factory replaces 10 repetitive tasks with one simple system. The art and craft is in that first process to make the template. That original pattern casts zillions of pieces."

Since 1995, Grimshaw has employed two industrial designers, Duncan Jackson and Eion Billings to tailor steel and aluminum components cost effectively. From building parts, they designed street signs, telephone masts, bus shelters, door handles and lights. At Fusion, their work is displayed inside silvered aluminium trunks, like the ones film crews and rock stars use to pack things flat. From previous exhibitions in Zurich and Munich, it moves to Liverpool in October, and from there to Japan.

Billboard snaps of Grimshaw buildings are set beside the bits and pieces that gave them lift-off. Different techniques are shown at different stages. Tooled pieces furred like Titanic salvage from the sea bed represent the lost wax process kick-started in a British factory that made handguns until they were outlawed. Only the lost wax process can make pieces with a spherical core, from gun barrels to bolt-together panes of glass on the Eurostar Terminal at Waterloo. No wonder Grimshaw goes ballistic at any suggestion that the terminus is cracking up: "As we understand it, some of the roof panels were damaged by window-cleaners and they replaced 35. I don't like people saying my building is falling down." A glimpse of its spine close up in Fusion is reassuring. A clip as slender as a dragonfly's body, but tough as steel, holds two panes of glass on either side. Its tail is a concertina-ed fan of rubber that allows the glass to rise and curve into the great caterpillar of the Eurostar Terminus, which measures at either end 36 metres, and soars to 48 metres in the middle. Tried and tested before installation to take the worst-case scenario of a train at full speed slamming to a halt, this concertina allows the glass viaduct to move up and down and not shatter.

Another steel piece shaped like a DNA cluster on stems, which bolts together big spans of glass evolved from a chunky piece like a spanner, supports the glass facade on the Financial Times building, and the slimmed-down version on tusks of steel rigged across the Western Morning News building in Plymouth. The Paddington Bear version will support the glass over Paddington station. What appears to be a chunky Viking breastplate in steel turns out to be bus shelter seats made for a Spanish billboard company. Hundreds of them line Madrid and Barcelona; New York's Mayor Giuliano has called to see them, South America wants them and Grimshaw is launching the modular system at Orgatec in Cologne this October.

How buildings are made may seem like a Blue Peter demo that you skip. Go and see it. As the century draws to a close, this exhibition blueprints a simpler way of making things that work. It is a sophisticated product range in a highly competitive market, that illustrates the disciplines and sensitivities required when designing a building. It involves structure, space - and a formidable master craftsman.

`Fusion' runs at the Wapping Hydraulic Power Station, Wapping Wall, London E1. Admission pounds 3, pounds 1.50 concs. (0171-377 2110)

The exhibition moves to the Tea Factory, Wood Street, Liverpool L1, from 30 October to 27 November. Admission free (0151-225 2914)