Luminaries will gather in the K Club this evening to celebrate the life and work of Peter Rice, Ireland's greatest structural engineer, as part of a drive to raise £2 million to endow a scholarship fund for Irish students at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design.
Peter Rice, whose life was cut short by a brain tumour in 1992, surely deserves to be celebrated. He worked with some of the most talented architects of the late 20th century, including I M Pei, Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers. What he did for them was to make their flights of fancy stand up.
As my colleague Kevin Myers noted in an eloquent tribute to Rice after his untimely death, engineers in Ireland have a poor reputation, mainly because their "instincts for destruction" were not matched by constructional ingenuity or by a sensitivity in the use of new materials and new techniques.
"Anybody who was favoured with the company of engineers in UCD will hardly be astonished that engineering projects in this country have been so uninspired, so vulgar, so dreary," he wrote. "One only ever had to regard their antics during rag weeks to tremble at what one day they might build."
Peter Rice, who grew up in Dundalk and learned his maths and physics through Irish, studied engineering in the less "beery and muscular" culture of Queen's University in Belfast. "Perhaps the more delicate engineering values in QUB encouraged Peter in the direction he was to take," Myers mused.
Certainly, his impact on 20th century architecture ranks alongside that of Isambard Kingdom Brunel in the Victorian era. With a post-graduate degree from Imperial College in London under his belt, Rice's brilliance showed early when he joined Ove Arup and got the job as site engineer for the Sydney Opera House.
Jorn Utzon, the Danish architect, had resigned in a fit of pique, so the onerous task of seeing his daring concept through to completion fell on the shoulders of the young Irish engineer. And what he brought to it was his boundless imagination as much as any of the structural engineering techniques he learned at college.
Rice went on to become one of the world's leading engineers, making creative use of structure and materials to enable architects to build buildings that might not have been feasible otherwise. The Pompidou Centre in Paris, designed by Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers, was another of his many achievements.
"Peter Rice is one of those engineers who has greatly contributed to architecture, reaffirming the deep creative interconnection between humanism and science, between art and technology," Piano once said of him. Rogers also detected "a sense of inner peace" about Rice which was reflected in everything he did.
He became a director of Ove Arup and Partners in 1978 and later formed RFR with Martin Francis and Ian Ritchie, the architect-engineer who designed the Monument of Light (aka "The Spike") for the site of Nelson's Pillar in O'Connell Street; Ritchie will be among the guests at tonight's function in the K Club.
RFR worked with I M Pei on the realisation of his plans to remake the Louvre in Paris; without their engineering input, the famous pyramid might have been a non-starter. And yet, it is Pei's name which is indelibly associated with the Louvre; as usual, the structural engineers have been air-brushed from the public record.
Though Rice was based in London, where he worked with Michael Hopkins on the tented Mound Stand at Lord's, much of RFR's work was in Paris. It included the great glass walls of the Cite des Sciences at La Villette and the tent-like canopy that softens the monumentality of the Grand Arche at La Defense. Other major commissions in France were terminal buildings at Charles de Gaulle and Marseille airports. But he also worked further afield on such projects as Osaka airport in Japan, the Houston Art Museum in Texas, the new Groningen Museum in the Netherlands and the Pavilion of the Future for Expo 92 in Seville.
In the year he died, Rice became the third engineer (after Ove Arup and Renzo Piano, who is better known as an architect) to be awarded the Gold Medal of the Royal Institute of British Architects; poignantly, he delivered his acceptance speech with his head swaddled in bandages in order to conceal the scars of brain surgery.
After his death just a few months later, Ian Roberts, then chairman of the Institution of Structural Engineers (Republic of Ireland branch), said he would have been immensely proud to be ranked alongside Brunel, even though he "always believed that the work was much more important than the personality of its designer".
What Rice admired about his 19th century predecessors was that they enjoyed the freedom to innovate and to explore the possibilities of the industrial revolution. By contrast, those who succeeded them had "become smothered by industry itself and the desire to standardise" the whole process of construction by regulation.
He always argued that this mould must be broken and "spent much of his life persuading people to do so", as Ian Roberts recalled. And though Ireland was still producing engineers of "immense ingenuity", design quality depended not just on a good education system but also on the culture and expectations of society at large. If we in Ireland wanted to have the forms of structures created by Peter Rice, we could start by reviewing the ways we procure major public projects and reward those who have the talent, he argued. And that would mean breaking out of the mould imposed by the "greater gods" of money, red tape and our natural conservatism.
But at least there is a chance that Rice will be commemorated, even if the impetus has come from the other side of the Atlantic. The proposal to establish a Peter R Rice Scholarship Fund is intended to enable two Irish students, from the North and the South, to continue their studies at Harvard's Graduate School of Design.
"Ireland is in an active mode of development, building new highway infrastructures, urban centres and housing estates, in which the fields of architecture, landscape architecture and urban planning and design all play an important role," as the prospectus puts it, perhaps exaggerating the value we place on such areas of endeavour.
Harvard sees its "groundbreaking initiative" as a way of increasing the presence of outstanding Irish students in its design school, where the late Kevin Kieran happily taught for many years, as well as forging stronger links with the "design community" in Ireland. The individual scholarships would be worth $36,000 per year.
The fund-raising committee includes such well-known names as Arthur Gibney, Seamus Heaney, Liz McManus TD and Kevin Roche as well as John Graby, director of the RIAI, and the heads of all four schools of architecture on the island - James Horan (DIT), Laurence Johnson (QUB), Loughlin Kealy (UCD) and Brian Norton (UU).
Among those who are supporting the initiative are Treasury Holdings, the Dublin-based property developers. Others who might be willing to put some money in the pot should contact the fund's administrator, Mary Shia, at Harvard University, telephone 001 617 495 4315, fax 001 495 5967 or by email at mshia@gsd.harvard.edu
