Lines

內容簡介

With a career embracing seamlessly urban planning, public sculpture, industrial design and engineering. Ian Ritchie is one of Britain's most visionary architects. Published here for the first time, his poems and etchings witness a profound engagement with the built environment.

Ritchie writes poetry in order better to understand a project's beginning, using words to investigate the particularities or challenges of a site, and the process of composition to bring ideas into focus. 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 are lines of thought, committed to paper before any visual designing. They demonstrate that for Ritchie being an architect involves more than is conventionally understood.