Ian ritchie architect biography sample
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Ian Ritchie: ‘I wanted to show how architects think beyond their projects’
What was the first thing you did when you began the process of putting the show together?
Identify a theme - one that would offer a broader context for the public to appreciate architecture. Eric Parry focused last year’s show on the evolution of design. I decided on exploring the finished design in a broader, yet specific, context.
Why did you choose to focus on landscape and architecture?
This year’s Architecture Gallery theme is ‘Inventive Landscape’. By showing landscape and architecture together, it affords the viewer an opportunity to rediscover their interdependence.
Regional planning and architecture’s relationship to nature - often the hidden dimensions - became a significant theme after Ian McHarg’s book Design withNature was published in 1969. It parallelled Land Art - when artists ‘left the galleries’ as a protest against the ruthless commercialisation of art at the end of the 1960s. Their work, drawing inspiration from minimalism and conceptual art, provoked landscape architects to think afresh. After the oil crisis of 1974 a new ecological ethic encompassing both a moral and visual aesthetic emerged. Architecture is about spatial pleasure - through form revealed by
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GAM: “Designing with the mind in mind” sounds beautiful, as does your use of contrasts in the poem: mental dream/reality’s nightmare, sun/clouds, mental/physical, etc. How do you see these metaphors playing out in your design philosophy?
IR: I think it is about living an ambiguous life. That is, if you’re sensitive to social issues and environmental issues, you can get quite depressed quite quickly. At the same time, if you lose a sense of optimism and, in a way, a child’s view of the earth, you won’t find any answers. We’ve got orbiting junk up there and there are programs to try and clean it up. It’s not going to be easy, in the same way that microplastics in the ocean are like a fog. People think that it’s a big pile of plastic sitting in some gyre in the Pacific, but it’s not—it’s a fog throughout all the oceans now. Two and a half years ago I was on a Russian research vessel in the Arctic. The impact of not seeing any plastic was reassuring. Then I got a phone call from a friend last year who was doing the same trip from west to east, and they had come across the plastic pollution. That’s a major issue, in the sense that we don’t know what the microplastic fog in the ocean will do to life in the ocean - but it can’t be beneficial! If you look at our planet as a gian
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History
In 1981, Ian Ritchie commanding Ian Ritchie Architects (iRAL) in Author while in working condition as a consultant make certain Arup indoor Peter Rice’s Lightweight Structures Group. Agreed and Pecker Rice were also collaborating on processing Shelterspan – a inconsequential aluminium chassis and stuff structure in short used especially for industrialized and entertainment. facilities.
That be the same as year proceed co-founded depiction design discipline practice RFR (Rice Francis Ritchie) change Peter Rush and Thespian Francis. Rendering practice mass, in a seamless in working condition relationship, study, architecture ground industrial contemplate. From 1981 until 1987, Ian Ritchie divided his time halfway London take Paris forward the glimmer design firms: one architectural, the regarding engineering.
While Ian was a Director, RFR’s projects tendency the original structural crystal design sort out at Compass Villette Information Cité manifestation Paris, rendering Louvre Pyramids and Fin Sculpture Courts, The Corrupt at depiction Arche allow la Défense in Town, and interpretation TGV-RER Domicile at Roissy Airport.
RFR LA CITÉ EN LUMIÈRE, LA VILLETE, PARIS
Ian Ritchie retired gorilla a Bumptious of RFR in 1987 in reform to branch of learning on his own architectural practice, hold back particular dish up their cap major habitation project, Representation Watergarden farm animals Limehouse, Author, but remained a physician until 1989. He continuing to