Ian Ritchie Architects
110 Three Colt Street
London
E14 8AZ
t: +44 (0)20 7338 1100
Ian Ritchie Architects remain connected and committed to providing unbroken professional services to our clients, colleagues and industry while staff are working from home.
We are pleased to announce that works have recently completed on the new foyer to the Susie Sainsbury Theatre at the Royal Academy of Music.
Ian is a member of the international jury for the Ghost Town Refuge competition launched by Young Architects Competitions (YAC) and Craco Ricerche aimed at breathing new life into the abandoned village of Craco in southern Italy.
Ian Ritchie Architects has won the commission for the concept feasibility design of the Maritime Heritage Visitor Experience at Thompson Dock and Titanic Quarter, Belfast.
Ian Ritchie Architects have been selected to participate in the Technische Universität Berlin – Chemical Invention Factory (CIF) competition.
Ian is a member of the jury for “The International Contextual Architecture Award in memory of Architect Turgut Cansever” organised by the Antalya Kepez Municipality, in cooperation with the Antalya Branch of the Chamber of Architects of Turkey, and endorsed by the UIA.
We are delighted to announce that the Royal Academy of Music project was named winner of the ‘Timber Interiors Fit Out’ category at the Timber Trades Journal (TTJ) Awards.
Ian Ritchie Architects are delighted to have been selected as one of five winners of the Cosentino Carved in Stone competition.
Open to the 49 winners of the RIBA National Awards 2018, the competition sought sculptural designs for a single 0.5metre cube of marble based on the theme ‘Life on Mars’.
Ian Ritchie Architects has won the competition for an estimated £50 million plan to develop Cyfarthfa Castle and its extended historic industrial landscape in Wales over the next year.
‘The spaces are stunningly beautiful and inspiring. They will raise the bar and challenge the students and staff in every possible form of music to reach higher and search further.’
Jonathan Freeman-Attwood, Principal, Royal Academy of Music
2019 WAF World Building of the Year – Nominee
2019 International Architecture Award – Winner
2019 EU Mies Award – Nominee
2019 AJ Specification Award – Winner
2019 Civic Trust Award – Winner
2019 World Architecture Community Award – Winner
Winner of 14 national and international awards in 2018
The scheme designed by Ian Ritchie Architects works with the historic context and architectural grain of this formerly neglected part of Covent Garden to create a vibrant, elegant new area of public space.
A contemporary central piazza forms the focal point of the development, which contains residential apartments, shops and restaurants.
2018 RICS Awards (London) – Finalist
2017 Constructing Excellence Awards – Winner
2017 Building Magazine Awards – Finalist
2017 WAF Awards – Finalist
The Sainsbury Wellcome Centre for Neural Circuits and Behaviour at UCL is one of the first buildings ever designed incorporating latest neuroscientific knowledge into its fabric from inception, and in open collaboration with its prospective neuroscientist users.
“This is a shockingly good building to work in.” Adam Kampff, PI
2018 German Design Award – Winner
2017 RICS Project of the Year Award (London) – Winner
2017 RICS Design through Innovation Award (London) – Winner
2017 Galvanising Awards Duplex Award – Winner
2016 BCI Award Major Building Project of the Year (over £50m) – Winner
The RIBA national award-winning, now iconic Courtyard Theatre designed by Ian Ritchie Architects has been transformed into a vibrant, naturally lit collection of dramatic theatre performance spaces over five floors within the original, naturally weathered folded Corten steel sheet envelope.
“The Other Place is a fabulous achievement.” Erica Whyman, RSC Deputy Artistic Director
2018 Civic Trust Awards – Finalist
2017 WAF Awards – Finalist
The Spire Monument in Dublin’s centre was inspired by and reflects the ever-changing light and composition of the Irish skies. The elegant and remarkably slender form continues the tradition of standing stones and obelisks and was designed to embody an optimistic and far reaching spirit of contemporary Ireland.
All theatre production activities in Plymouth Theatre Royal’s TR2 are centralised and integrated with educational and rehearsal spaces. The design’s most striking elements are rehearsal pods, clad in a unique woven phosphor-bronze cloth, soft to eye and hand, ‘randomly’ placed on the rock riverbank.
Ian Ritchie Architects’ design for a permanent Concert Platform in Corten steel in London’s Crystal Palace Park is sculptural without being sculpture, bold yet reinforcing the surrounding rich and beautiful Paxton landscape. Nevertheless, its simplicity belies the complex acoustic performance required of it.
This 3,000m2 research office building was designed for the Prudential and Magdalen College JV. The building ‘floats’ above undercroft parking, the entrance is sheltered and east and west facing windows are shaded by horizontal veils of stainless steel mesh. The design provides adaptable accommodation for single or multiple occupancy, and the environmental controls permit natural ventilation through to full air conditioning.
Ian Ritchie Architects were commissioned by Stanhope to design, detail, supervise and deliver a multi-tenancy research-office building of 9,000m2 within 52 weeks to a fixed budget at the renowned Stockley Park. We developed the first double glazed Planar with Pilkington for the external walls. The finished building gave 92% net rental area and received several awards.
Ian Ritchie Architects led the design and realisation of the world’s largest glass hall for the new Leipzig International Exhibition Centre in collaboration with gmp. Combining simplicity of concept and construction with elegance and economy, it appears as a filigree shell within the site’s central landscape.
Ian Ritchie Architects designed the three iconic 35m high glass circulation towers giving the new Reina Sofia Museum of Modern Art in Madrid its architectural image. It was the world’s first glass installation which transferred wind load through the corner glass panels.
Ian Ritchie Architects helped conceive and develop the structure and glazing designs of the 6,000m2 roofs covering the three internal courtyards of the Louvre’s Richelieu wing, creating the Museum’s new Sculpture Courts proposed by I. M. Pei & Michel Macary.
In 1981 Ian Ritchie established his own architectural practice – Ian Ritchie Architects Ltd. (iRAL) and co-founded Rice Francis Ritchie (RFR) a design engineering practice in Paris – with Peter Rice and Martin Francis.
RFR did seminal work on glass and fabric structures during the 80s on the Museum of Science, Technology and Industry at La Villette, and the Louvre – pyramids and sculpture courts.
By the 1990s iRAL had become world-renowned for their glass architecture, material-technical innovation and intelligent environmental and sustainable design – of which iRAL’s most recent major projects, the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre for Neural Circuits and Behaviour (2016), and Royal Academy of Music Theatre and Recital Hall in London, (2018) are an evolution.
iRAL has won over 60 competitions in Europe and the UK and received over 100 national and international awards.
In this book extract Ian Ritchie RA reveals the deeper meaning of his life as an architect
A career in architecture engages with so many disciplines and aspects of life it is impossible not to enjoy it. The cyclical phenomena of nature – day following night following day, the life-regenerating cycle of the seasons – provide evidence for the Taoist paradigm. Successes and failures in architecture are part of the duality of being alive – happy and sad, good and bad, life and death. I am reminded that no amount of darkness can extinguish a candle’s flame. This is why, for me, optimism always prevails.
Architecture provides a physical reference to our cultural past and, at the point of conception, both expresses and gives us confidence to imagine a better future.
Beyond utility and aesthetics, built architecture has a metaphysical role - it shapes the emotions and behaviours of those who will live with it.
A metaphysical inquiry into the nature of space, structure and light is essential to envisage architecture that will lift the human spirit.
When the elements of this trinity are in harmony, a tangible sense of wholeness and serenity imbues an architecture that is able to touch the mind through the observer’s senses.
Architecture makes the existential tangible, and our sense of place is both a response to our physical environment and a cultural creation.
110 Three Colt Street
London
E14 8AZ
t: +44 (0)20 7338 1100