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

PE: “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 giant computer, we (human beings) are a really nasty computer virus! Until we recognise that we are actually a virus, and not beneficial to the planet, we won’t change. So, the idea of going into space to colonise strikes me as completely and utterly daft.

PE: What is your strategy to avoid reality’s nightmare?

IR: An interesting exercise is telling a story of a tree to architecture students: If you describe all the aspects of a tree you realise you are looking at a miracle. Unbelievable. Genetically a tree species may be the same, but each individual tree is different. Everything is intelligent: the tree knows how to put out branches to capture the maximum sunlight. It’s driven by the invisible, the moon’s pull, gravity, O2 and CO2 and of course light. This kind of wonder is a metaphor for the proper way of designing. If design is a process, not an end product, the future lies in our ability to grow architecture in a way that is intelligent. It may still have to do with algorithms but it has a lot more to do with the materiality of how we make things.

At the moment, when we look at the building industry, it produces 50% of the carbon in the atmosphere, and apparently 10% of that total is produced by concrete. There are ways of manufacturing concrete that is not as carbon-intensive, but we are not addressing those issues—such as how can we make buildings without digging great big holes in the ground to pour concrete into, or long piles. There are ways of looking at slightly more dynamic buildings that don’t damage the earth and its surface, and that can be stable without having to be super stiff (static). I work with “dynamics”, because that’s how I learned engineering: all structures move, so instead of looking at trying to be absolutely rigid you can look at things that are more flexible, but are safe. That’s how a tree works, interestingly. You bend with the wind a little bit, but obviously our own internal dynamic and our sense of balance have to measure against that. But we spend a lot of energy doing things that are too extreme instead of relaxing and saying,’it’s fine.’

PE: Ethical is a key term that one often reads in connection with your designs. You also use it in your mission statement. What does it mean to you?

IR: It’s about sharing values, which could also describe my design philosophy. Today, we seem to value shares more than we share values. These values are the ones that have ethics behind them, whether it’s working with other people, interpersonal relationships, working with the Earth, the planet, oxygen: it’s a way of finding an intelligent way of working with situations. Nature is unpredictable whereas we spend our time designing predictability, taking away unpredictability. We have to predict the behaviour of a structure, predict the behaviour of air moving in a building, and predict the first and second reflections you’ll get off a building with light or sound. But in doing so we are always designing out the beauty, with every step we take toward predictability.. Therefore, we must invent an aesthetic that suits our age in order to be able to say “this is beautiful.”

Beauty is simply non-linear. It’s why we like watching a flame, or light on the water on a sea or a river: because you cannot predict the next thing. And that’s the beauty of nature. We will probably have the computing power in the next hundred years or so to measure every single snowflake that falls out of the sky somewhere on the planet, but there is no point so we won’t. That magic of nature—the unpredictable—is beauty. When we say “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” this only refers to the man-made.