
Ian Ritchie
Ian Ritchie is the director of Ian Ritchie Architects Ltd (established in 1981) and co-founded Rice Francis Ritchie (RFR) design engineers, Paris (1981). Ian Ritchie Architects has “sister” practices in Europe.
These practices have realized and contributed to major new architectural and engineering works throughout Europe, including the Reina Sofía Museum of Modern Art in Madrid, the Leipzig Messe Glass Hall, the Louvre Sculpture Courts and Pyramid, La Villette Cité des Sciences, the Jubilee Line Extension and International Regatta Centre in London, The Spire in Dublin, and the Royal Shakespeare Company Courtyard Theatre. Current projects include th Sainsbury Wellcome Centre for Neural Circuits and Behaviour at University College London (completion in 2014); Royal Academy of Music’s new opera theater in London; transformation of the Tricycle Theatre, Kilburn and reconfiguring the Royal Shakespeare Company Courtyard Theatre; residential-led mixed developments in Covent Garden and Bromley; and a new business park and visitor center in Malta.
Ritchie has acted as design master planner for the Natural History Museum and The British Museum, and for city center sites in London, Birmingham, Copenhagen, Dublin, Glasgow, and Edinburgh, as well as conceiving and designing international exhibitions for major European galleries.
He currently advises the Royal Shakespeare Company (design); The Ove Arup Foundation (education); the European Construction Technology Platform (research agenda); the Director of the Centre for Urban Science and Progress New York University; the Dean, School of Architecture, Design and Construction, University of Greenwich; the President, Columbia University, Manhattanville Project; and Backstage Trust.
Ian Ritchie is a Royal Academician, member of the Akademie der Künste, Honorary Visiting Professor at Liverpool University, and Emeritus Commissioner Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE). He has been Royal Academy of Arts’ Professor of Architecture and Chair of its Collections and Library Committee, Visiting Professor of Architecture at Moscow and Vienna Universities, Special Professor at Leeds University faculty of Engineering, and taught at the Architectural Association (AA) and University of Westminster in London. He is a Fellow of the Society of Façade Engineering.
He is invited regularly to international juries and has chaired several, including the French government’s Nouveaux Jeunes Albums (2004), RIBA Stirling Prize (2006), and Doolan Awards Scotland (2009).
His practice has received more than 60 national and international awards for his projects and has been shortlisted four times for the RIBA Stirling Prize and the European Mies Van der Rohe Prize. Ritchie has personally been honored with a CBE, the French Académie d’Architecture Grand Silver Medal for Innovation (the first foreign architect, joining a small and illustrious list including Candela, Nervi, Buckminster Fuller, Prouvé and Rice); the Iritecna Design Prize for Europe; the Eric Lyons Memorial Award for European Housing; and the Commonwealth Association of Architects Award for the Advancement of Architecture. He lectures regularly on art, urbanism, regeneration, light, structures, glass technology, and innovation, delivering talks at prestigious venues including the Royal Academy of Arts, Tate Gallery, Royal Society of Arts, RIBA, ICA, Hayward Gallery, Pompidou Centre, European Commission, New York’s Center for Architecture, and on behalf of the British Council, CABE, the UK Lord Chancellor, and the British Science Association.
His practice has a reputation for delivering designs that are consistently cutting-edge (and unexpected) in terms of techniques and materials, inventiveness, imaginatively conceived details, and an integration of architecture, engineering, and fabrication. In addition, the practice has undertaken research and development for major international companies including Corus, Pilkington, Mero, and Seele.
His firm’s architecture is regularly published in journals and books worldwide, including Ian Ritchie: Technoecology by Alessandro Rocca (Whitney Library of Design, 1998). Books by Ritchie include (Well) Connected Architecture (1994), The Biggest Glass Palace in the World (1997), Plymouth Theatre Royal Production Centre, (2003), The Spire (2004), The RSC Courtyard Theatre (2006), The Leipzig Book of Drawings (2007), Lines, an illustrated book of poetry (2010), and Being: An Architect (2014).
Announcements
If Walls Could Speak: My Life in Architecture by Moshe Safdie
If Walls Could Speak: My Life in Architecture
By Moshe Safdie
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic
Published: September 2022
One of the world’s greatest and most thoughtful architects recounts his extraordinary career and the iconic structures he has built—from Habitat in Montreal to Marina Bay Sands in Singapore—and offers a manifesto for the role architecture should play in society.
Design Emergency: Building a Better Future by Alice Rawsthorn and Paola Antonelli
Design Emergency: Building a Better Future
By Alice Rawsthorn and Paola Antonelli
Publisher: Phaidon Press
Published: May 2022
Rawsthorn and Antonelli tell the stories of the remarkable designers, architects, engineers, artists, scientists, and activists who are at the forefront of positive change worldwide. Focusing on four themes—Technology, Society, Communication, and Ecology—the authors present a unique portrait of how our great creative minds are developing new design solutions to the major challenges of our time, while helping us to benefit from advances in science and technology.
Why Design Matters: Conversations with the World’s Most Creative People by Debbie Millman
Why Design Matters: Conversations with the World's Most Creative People
By Debbie Millman
Publisher: Harper Design
Published: February 22, 2022
Debbie Millman—author, educator, brand consultant, and host of the widely successful and award-winning podcast “Design Matters”—showcases dozens of her most exciting interviews, bringing together insights and reflections from today’s leading creative minds from across diverse fields.
Growing Up Underground: A Memoir of Counterculture New York by Steven Heller
Growing Up Underground: A Memoir of Counterculture New York
By Steven Heller
Publisher: Princeton Architectural Press
Published: October 2022
An entertaining coming-of-age memoir from Steven Heller, award-winning designer, writer, and former senior art director at the New York Times, that takes readers on a visually inspired look back at being at the center of New York’s youth culture in the 1960s and ’70s.
Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall by Alexandra Lange
Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall
By Alexandra Lange
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Published: June 2022
Chronicles postwar architects’ and merchants’ invention of the shopping mall, revealing how the design of these marketplaces played an integral role in their cultural ascent. Publishers Weekly writes, “Contending that malls answer ‘the basic human need’ of bringing people together, influential design critic Lange advocates for retrofitting abandoned shopping centers into college campuses, senior housing, and ‘ethnocentric marketplaces’ catering to immigrant communities. Lucid and well researched, this is an insightful study of an overlooked and undervalued architectural form.”
Women Holding Things by Maira Kalman
Women Holding Things
By Maira Kalman
Publisher: Harper Design
Published: October 2022
In the spring of 2021, Maira and Alex Kalman created a small, limited-edition booklet, “Women Holding Things,” which featured select recent paintings by Maira, accompanied by her insightful and deeply personal commentary. The booklet quickly sold out. Now, the Kalmans have expanded that original publication into an extraordinary visual compendium. We see a woman hold a book, hold shears, hold children, hold a grudge, hold up, hold her own. In visually telling their stories, Kalman lays bare the essence of women’s lives—their tenacity, courage, vulnerability, hope, and pain.
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