Ian Ritchie RA
Born: 24 June 1947
Elected RA: December 1998
Elected RA Professor of Architecture: December 2004
Category of Membership: Architect
Ian Ritchie uses the interplay between words and images to distil varied influences from technology, social concerns, history and context into exquisite and delicate forms. Language is the common currency between them, and its potential opened up to him as a student in Liverpool, when he hung out at the Everyman Theatre with the poet Roger McGough. He finds it a vital tool to explore ideas, explaining that ‘the meaning and value of an idea lies in language.’ Once the possibilities of an idea are established drawing becomes the means to give it a visual existence. There is a remarkable concurrence between the elegant brushstrokes with which he depicts his projects and their built reality, whether they are as richly simple as the Spire of Dublin, or as complex as the White City shopping complex in West London.
Ian Ritchie CBE RA, Leipzig Glass Hall Outwardly, and especially early in his career, Ritchie’s architecture bears certain similarities to ‘high tech’. He did spend the first four years of his career from 1972-6, after completing his studies at the Polytechnic of Central London (now University of Westminster), working for Norman Foster. A couple of years in France from 1976-8 where he built several projects himself exposed him to another side of the construction industry, and when he returned to the UK in 1979 to found Chrysalis Architects with Mike Davies and Alan Stanton his projects showed an interest in matching technology and materials to programme and context. Where appropriate, such as the towers at the Reina Sofia Art Centre in Madrid or a crisp office building at Stockley Park, he has developed advanced glass and glazing assemblies. Other projects, like a boathouse in the Royal Docks, use more elemental materials such as the rough stones held in position with wire cages of gabion wall construction.
Since founding Ian Ritchie Architects in London and Rice Francis Ritchie in Paris in 1981, Ritchie has a propensity to find expressive potential in projects which lie at the limits of conventional architecture. In 1995 he won a competition for a new electricity pylon, turning the design of a utilitarian object into a meditation on the nature of progress. A competition platform for Crystal Palace becomes a sculptural object in a landscape which transcends its immediate function. The ventilation towers on the Jubilee underground line are sculptural in form but serve a specific purpose. Other projects like the Spire of Dublin and Alba di Milano are overtly sculptural, though the only different between architecture and sculpture, Ritchie comments, is that ‘architecture has working toilets’. Each of Ritchie’s projects starts with an idea, and what lends those ideas consistency, whether they originate from technology, context, social or functional priorities, or pure aesthetics, is their refinement through language before he gives them visual form.
Contact details for further information
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