Ian Ritchie - Lines

Published here for the first time, architect Ian Ritchie’s poems, aphorisms, and etchings attest to
a profound engagement with the built environ­ment. Ritchie (b. 1947) is one of Britain’s most
visionary architects, with an eclectic practice embracing urban planning, public sculpture, and
industrial design. His calligraphic etchings imagine the shape or spirit of commissions in simple
but powerful strokes. Variably pragmatic and philosophical, often witty, his aphorisms on work
and life—from the importance of light to the nature and possibility of progress—reveal a
modernist’s belief in the potential of architecture to improve society. These lines of thought,
committed to paper before any designing begins, demonstrate that, for Ritchie, being an
architect is many more things besides.
7 A QUARTET FOR IAN Roger McGough
8 STILL MUSIC (CRYSTAL PALACE CONCERT PLATFORM)
10 EARLY THOUGHTS FOR BERMONDSEY STATION
12 LEIPZIG GLASS HALL
14 ALBA Dl MILANO (DAWN OF MILAN)
16 NATURE’S CURVE (EDF PYLONS)
18 WHERE THE SUN IS BIG (TERRASSON CULTURAL GREENHOUSE)
20 IRELAND’S LIGHT (SPIRE OF DUBLIN)
22 UNDERGROUND WINDS (JUBILEE LINE VENT SHAFTS)
24 FRESH STONE (OBERHAUSEN)
26 PIN-STRIPED BUSINESSMEN (B8 STOCKLEY PARK)
27 PLANES OF GUERNICA (REINA SOFIA MUSEUM)
28 CATENARY LANDSCAPE (LONDON REGATTA CENTRE)
30 DRIFTWOOD (PLYMOUTH THEATRE ROYAL PRODUCTION CENTRE)
32 POTTERS FIELDS
34 GREEN WHITECITY
36 CROSSRAIL IOD
38 SPACETIME (HAWKING SPACETIME CENTRE)
40 THE SUITCASE (EAGLE ROCK)
41 EAGLE ROCK
42 FLUY
44 RSC COURTYARD THEATRE
46 POIETIC GENERATOR (FRANCE-JAPAN COMMUNICATIONS MONUMENT)
48 ROCKET JUNCTION (LIVERPOOL GATEWAY)
50 CONTEMPORARY ANTIQUITY (BRITISH MUSEUM)
52 BEYOND CARBON NEUTRAL (PURFLEET FUTURE HOUSING
54 GIANT’S CAUSEWAY
56 PHARMACIE (PHARMACY IN BOVES)
58 ZEBEDE (ZEBEDE DESK LAMP)
59 TIP-TOE TABLE (0_1200 TABLE)
60 TURVILLE SUN
62 SHAKESPEARE BRIDGE
64 ‘S’SEAT
66 SLIDING ARC (LEAMOUTH OPENING BRIDGE)
68 FLOATING PEARL (PEARL OF DUBAI)
70 ORANMORE LANDS
72 UNDERGROUND LIMPET (WOOD LANE STATION)
74 NEW ANFIELD
76 IN SEARCH OF THE OUTDOOR ROOM (SCOTLAND’S HOME OF TOMORROW)
78 MOVING OFFICE (110 THREE COLT STREET)
80 DREAMING OF A PROJECT
82 BURIED STABLES (WHITE CITY UNDERGROUND DEPOT)
84 INDUSTRIAL CURTAIN (GENEVA COMEDIE)
86 THEATRE OF ROBOTS (BMW)
88 SOVEREIGNTY (BERLIN EMBASSY)
90 STONE SKIPPING (NATIONAL MUSEUM OFTHE BOAT)
92 LANDMARK WALES
94 HOME
96 ON THE RIM OF REASON: THE PULSE FROM EDGE TO THE CENTRE AND OUT AGAIN
STILL MUSIC

We will finesse
the fineness
of emptiness.

Still in winter.

Balanced plane
of levitas and
gravitas.

Music from silence.

EARLY THOUGHTS FOR BERMONDSEY STATION

We can measure the temperature of light,

but can we feel the colour of the wind?
The sensuality of underground public space
must bring the outside climate down.

The flow of the Thames is in the soil.

It marks the direction of travel
and mirrors the daily passage of the sun
which ought to resonate in our design.

In a world which is hurry hurry,

and rougher rougher, can a calmer calmer,
slower slower place be allowed
as part of London’s Underground?

We must touch light, touch the soil.

We must feel the temperature,
we must smell the wind
and paint colours in our mind.
LEIPZIG GLASS HALL

A framed emptiness
brings down the sky
to meet the earth.
Diaphanous shell
stretched taut over
squared silhouettes
of thin round metal.

Light chases darkness.

Shadows are holes
in light. Colours flow
throughout the space.
Sunlight and cloud,
the shadows come and go.
ALBA Dl MILANO (DAWN OF MILAN)

Alba is an arc, so subtle it is almost

imperceptible.
The desire to reach the heavens asks man to
overcome the arc,
this escaping arc that simply manifests gravity,
whether through the solid arrow from a bow,
or curving water falling from a spout,
or a luminous November rocket fading away,
has held us entranced for centuries.
Man eventually made it, but now we ask for
what purpose.
Humankind’s lifeboat may exist one day,
and find new water upon which to float and
drink
thanks to the diminished arc,
but the future may deem that we simply
changed a letter.
Arc for ark, and another myth for man.
NATURE’S CURVE

Bitumen roads and steel rails

slide across the countryside
marking the flow of contours,
just as the viaduct’s comb
measures its topography.

Of all our infrastructures,

power lines ignore Earth’s curves,
forming catenary lines
without much affinity.

Hanging these transmission wires,

the skeletal Goliaths stride
miles across rolling hills,
grey imperious warriors.

We’ll design for our own age,

with a new aesthetic form
responding to the landscape,
far more in tune with nature.
WHERE THE SUN IS BIG

A fragment of a greenhouse
within a landscape of fragments
from imagined continents.

Where the sun is big

and the wind is yellow.

Where the mass of the Earth

meets the lightness of the air.

Where walls are walls,

not covered up,
the same inside as outside
and we can act within and without.

Where our accumulated culture

cannot cover the walls
and cracks in the walls are real
and do not worry us.

Where the roof is a lake

but opaque to water and wind,
a virtual surface for the heavens,
where water is both real and imaginary.
Where the sun is big
and imagination is free.

Where rough does not touch smooth,

where the earth does not touch the sky.
Only wavelengths change and we get hot.

Where the sun is big.

IRELAND’S LIGHT

A monument inspired by the light of

Ireland’s ever-changing skies, ever
present by day and by night.

Tall, elegant, conical structure

symbolising growth, search, release,
thrust, optimism in Ireland’s future.

Granite anchored underneath the street,

sliding past a bronze spiral base a shell of
peened silver stainless steel.

Urban line and point upon the site

softly reflecting sunlit clouds
while swaying in the wind, a night-light.
UNDERGROUND WINDS

Builders’ grilles and louvres

somehow fail to reflect
the motion of air
and its non-linear qualities
of turbulence and pressure.

I would like to develop

an architecture in landscapes
(where leaves show us the motions of wind)
that allow the man-made winds
below the land to kiss free air.