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

PE: Your architectural designs are also quite unpredictable. Your designs cannot be pinned down to a distinctive style…

IR: We don’t have a style. You can’t say that’s an Ian Ritchie Architects building. You wouldn’t know, although you might begin to guess because of the refinement of everything and allusions to visual unpredictability through randomness of the behaviour of light or rocks, or planned ageing. People discover we did this building or that building, and that’s kind of nice. Intellectually we’ve been always outsiders. I never received an overall critical review of our work.
And you can’t get out of bed every morning thinking, ‘I am doing another one of those buildings.’ I would die a death of boredom.

PE: Is this partly due to the fact that you take context analysis or the individual clients’ ideas very seriously?

IR: To give you a quite early example: The first building I did in England was called “Eagle Rock,” a house which looks a little like a crashed airplane in a wood. Peter Cook came down to see and review it and said: “Oh god, the eagle has landed.” He never expected to see a house like that in England. Possibly California, yes, but not in England. But it was the result of a conversation I had with the client three years earlier, while I was renovating the outside of her large villa in Italy. Her passion was orchids, and she would go on trips looking for rare orchids. She mentioned, three years before she did return to England, that she would like a house, and asked me “what would my house be like?” I replied that given her description of her life she just needed a very good suitcase, and asked if she wanted to be encumbered by something anchored to the ground. Three years later we looked for and found a site. At that point the conversation from three years earlier, about the flying suitcases, became translated through a poem into the idea of packing cases in the landscape with a transparent canopy over top. It was the idea that nothing was anchored to the ground, that she could pick up the house and leave if she wanted to. Of course, as she was getting older, everything became serious. The concept evolved into the roof being glass and permanent, and the boxes being joined up to give her a house. That’s why it looks like a crashed airplane.

It all comes from starting with the user. Knowing if we understand the user and what they really want, that’s when we can become skilful architects. If we start the other way around—what’s it going to look like? — you never get to the user. We always start from the inside. It’s the fundamental thing: is the brief correct? You test it against the users. Often, it’s not what they want. It’s quite rare for scientists, or even musicians or students, to be involved in the process with the architect. You could argue that they are not going to be the ones who will be there, if the building is there for a hundred or two hundred years. However, they are there for that moment, and it’s up to us to understand what they really need and then to think beyond it. And when you do that, the spatial configurations that start to emerge have to be balanced by the context with the outdoor walls of your building, which become walls framing the public spaces of the city. Each street is a room in the city, and it has these walls, and very often architects forget that they are actually creating these framing elements that create a room in the city. All of that leads you to thinking, to analysing, as you would compose an opera. That’s a nice expression, as opera in Italian, of course, means ‘a work’. So, I think that’s more demanding of an architect to think like that than it is to “render and tender.”