Ian Ritchie in conversation with Petra Eckhard (GAM Lab, TU Graz) – March 2019
PE: You initially came from the world of medicine and then changed to architecture. Many people would consider this a big shift …
IR: In fact, it isn’t. Everything goes through our brains, as we are humans. Medicine is largely looking at the inside of your body, through our brain, and architecture looks at the body in space on the outside, through our brain. So, it’s not a huge jump. If you take your own hand, everything is architecture: you have got a skin, all the services, and you’ve got the structure underneath, and its dynamic is controlled by the brain. It moves. Those are the basic ingredients of architecture. Statics is the German engineers’ language, as is the concept of “nothing moves and everything is fixed.” Of course, nothing is fixed. Also, the brain is scale-free. This is why our UCL neuroscience building has all the scales of spaces that (users) want. Long ones, tall ones, small ones; and they also know they can change them, up to a certain point. It’s another scientific instrument for them.
PE: With the UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience project you designed a place for education and research. What is the most important skill students of architecture must acquire?
IR: I have noticed that, particularly since you now pay for your education in the UK and in America, tutors say: “Just do it. Come back tomorrow.” Actually, thinking is the most difficult thing to do. Students are not encouraged to think; they’re encouraged to do. In other words, they’re encouraged to be homo faber (the maker) rather than homo sapiens (the thinker). I think that is part of our disease. The other one, which I’ve learned, again from neuroscientists, is that our brains evolved not to understand the environment; they evolved to understand each other and to communicate with other human beings. Our natural DNA is not to read the environment, which is probably why we make mistakes in the air and make mistakes in the water. At the moment, because education is now a commodity—the production of a university is a commodity and everything is measured, quantified financially or by exam results—it’s not measured by quality anymore. How to learn to think is the thing that is missing. I don’t think students are encouraged when time comes into play. I’m quite interested by the student that carries on thinking, and if they haven’t the maturity yet to program their thinking time into their work, that’s understandable because they’re students. Learning to think and making the time to think is vital.
PE: In your opinion, what makes a successful architectural project?
IR: My favourite architect of all time is Sinan. He was the architect to the Ottoman Empire. He became an architect at 50, and before that he was an engineer. One could say he was fortunate in that he had the richest client in the world for fifty years. Sinan was taken into the army in his twenties and had a natural ability to analyse problems and solve them, and he understood geometry from a young age. This included geology, water supply, drainage, boat building, engineering and organising teams to work together. Working together well where no individual is the owner of the work is the secret. There are wonderful examples of his work which have to do with the Ottoman Empire expanding to the West. In particular they had problems with bridges, and particularly with one bridge that kept collapsing. Many engineers were trying to solve it, and he looked at it and said: “We just widen the river to slow the water speed down.” It is all about the infrastructure. He understood that.
PE: Thank you for the interview.
