peter rice

CITATION
"Peter Rice is one of the foremost
structural engineers of his time. His
work hos greatly advanced
architecture, reaffirming the deep
creative interconnection between
humanism and science, art and
technology. His many distinguished
contributions started with his
appointment as site engineer for Ove
Arup and Partners to the Sydney
Opera House, after which he
designed the structure at the
Pompidou Centre in Paris, where his
innovative choice of cost steel
enabled the scale of this large
building to be sympathetic to the
fabric of the city.
His approach to using materials hos
always been innovative and
sympathetic to their nature. Yet he
hos never pursued innovation for its
own sake, but to improve the quality
of buildings and human life.
Noteworthy in this context ore his
travelling workshops for Otronto in
Italy where, with his partner Renzo
Piano (himself a Royal Gold
Medallist), he invented collapsible
fabric tents to provide the means by
which local inhabitants could improve
their own surroundings without
having to leave their homes. His
collaborations with Piano hove
always produced work of the highest
order. Perhaps the most impressive
result of their teamwork is the De
Menil Collection Museum at Houston,
T exos, where his choice of ferroconcrete
and ductile iron for the
leaves of the roof, allowed a
marvellous quality of light in the
interior.
He hos worked with many other
architects besides Piano. His gloss
walls at the Science Museum at Lo
Villette in Paris incorporate
components from the motor industry to
allow vistas of great splendour; his
canopy under the Grande Arche at Lo
Defense brings human scale to a huge
monument; his ingenious
collaboration with Michael Hopkins
and Partners in the design of the
Lord's Mound Stand enabled the
immemorial English village tradition
of watching cricket from tents and
pavilions to be reinvoked in our own
days for large numbers of people in
the middle of London.
He hos mode a great contribution to
anchoring the art of architecture to
real life, real science and real
modernity. His contribution to the
creative process is continuous, both in
relation to other members of the team
for a particular project and to the art
of architecture in general. For him,
the creative process is not linear but a
loop between interactive disciplines.
The creation of architecture is mode
up of periods of silence, of sudden
intuition and of passionate teamwork,
and the quintessence of this is Peter
Rice. His passionate belief that
technology is a tool to be used with
imagination for the benefit of
mankind hos inspired a generation of
designers of buildings of all
disciplines."