Ian Ritchie in conversation with Petra Eckhard (GAM Lab, TU Graz) – March 2019

“Architecture has two distinct phases:
the mental dream and reality’s nightmare”

Ian Ritchie in conversation with Petra Eckhard (GAM Lab, TU Graz) – March 2019

Ian Ritchie’s architectural programs emerge from the ethos to deliver socially beneficial and ecologically sustainable projects. His London-based office, Ian Ritchie Architects, has won more than 80 national and international awards, several of which the office received in 2018. Early this year, one of his latest projects, the opera house for The Royal Academy of Music in London, opened its doors and presented its new performance spaces for opera and musical theatre to the public. Petra Eckhard (PE) met Ian Ritchie (IR) during his visit to Graz and talked to him about fluid dynamics and the power of poetry in the design process.

PE: Can you describe your design philosophy in three words?

IR: “Sensual, intelligent, egoless.”
And also: “Aphorisms grow shoots.” Meaning, aphorisms set the design process going. The aphorism expressed by this particular phrase is especially important because it summarises my philosophy.

PE: Can you elaborate on that? Why is an aphorism, or more generally, poetic language a useful tool for architectural design?

IR: Words come before the drawing during my design process, because exploring ideas through words doesn’t lock down a concept too quickly. When you draw something and it locks into your brain, you can’t actually delete it—even if you can burn the paper or throw it away—whereas using words one can explore ideas like an archaeologist. You’re looking for the essence of the project, so you’ve got this temporal palimpsest, if you like, in your brain about the way the project might appear in the next five years. And you go through the layers and shuffle aspects of the nascent design around—the client or the site or the environment or the politics or the social responsibility—all these things come into your mind, and it’s impossible to draw something. It’s actually stupid, in my opinion, to draw something too quickly. I suppose if you like language—written language or spoken language—it’s because language is something we have in common and it’s our natural means of communication, the one that we’ve evolved. Everybody more or less understands talking to each other and having conversation, though I do sometimes question the ability of today’s younger society to stay focused on a discussion or an argument. That seems to have vaporised. But, in my case, I carry on moving the words around until I find what I think is the key to the project, and then I condense that prose into a poem just to get the beginnings of a feeling of what the project might become. If I am very lucky, I write an aphorism, but the aphorism is rarely related specifically to a visualisation of the project. It’s often more about humour. In a way, it’s kind of designing with language.

PE: So prior to designing a structure, it helps to compose a poem?

IR: Half-way through the competition for the UCL Neuroscience Lab I wrote a poem. I have to find it on my phone. This is from 2008/2009 and it is called “Dreaming of a Project,” because we actually wanted to win it. I can read it to you, if you want.

PE: Yes, that’d be great…

IR:
“As the banks crashed,
the fishing began.
We watched fish fly,
new born lambs jump
and architects worry
about the next job.

Are architects magicians?
Bankers manipulated
and spirited away
immense substance.
But above all,
loyalty and trust.

What do magicians do?
The science of magic?
As neuroscientists
research the mind
magicians play with it.
How?
Did they misdirect us?
Divert our attention?
Blind us temporarily?
Do they fill in the gaps?
Fill in the margins between
the frames of a film?
Our eyes see, but not the film.
We see wheels go backwards
because we snap the world.
We imagine, we fill in.
And then there is memory.
Under which cup is the ball?
What card did I pick?
Ah, the magician has secrets!
The illusion of free will,
And as now with the bankers
we trust not the magician?

Architects are not magicians.
They are dreamers.
My architecture starts
in the spaces I create in my mind.
Space is in here and out there, it is a continuum between inside and outside, mental and physical.

Architecture has two distinct phases:
The mental dream and reality’s nightmare.
Being an optimist, I know
the dream is always there,
like the sunshine behind the darkest cloud
and the snowflake in the rain.

We can imagine two futures,
the one we dream of,
and the one left to fate.
Or we can imagine one future,
the one we dream of and the one we left to fate.

To be able to read our reality
requires a reference. Our dreams.
Some of our dreams questions reality’s reality.
Now I am designing with the mind in mind.
Dreams? I try to build mine
avoiding the nightmare.