Dreaming Spires

Ian Ritchie says he "just knew" that he had come up with a winner 20 minutes after he first sketched the Millennium Spire for O'Connell Street. He had also done it site unseen, taking the view that he really didn't need to visit Dublin to design a monument for the city.

Mr Ritchie oozes confidence. He has a very impressive track record as a designer, with projects of such extraordinary prestige as the Grand Louvre in Paris, and does not feel that he has any apologies to make. He is also unusually blunt in expressing his views on the work of some architectural superstars.

Thus, he dismisses Sir Norman Foster's new dome over the Reichstag in Berlin as "crap" and says its internal spiral walkway, meant to represent the people over parliament, was "more of Foster's crap". And "dead" is the word he uses to characterise the new buildings produced by Arata Isosaki and Renzo Piano at nearby Potsdamer Platz.

Mr Ritchie is vituperative about the way I.M. Pei, the Chinese-American architect, has monopolised the pyramid at the Louvre, even to the extent of holding a copyright on images of it. Airbrushed out of the credits is his own firm, RFR (Rice Francis Ritchie), which designed the structure and made it stand up. "Absolutely outrageous, disgusting", he fumes.

He's done a deal with Dublin Corporation on the revenue potential of images of the Millennium Spire, to end confusion caused by a lack of clarity over this issue in the competition brief. As a result, the copyright will be held by the corporation, but a trust will be set up to distribute the proceeds for community development.

Ian Ritchie's home on the Isle of Dogs in London is the closest to Canary Wharf, and he has spent the past 25 years working with community groups in the area; for a time, he was known as the "Red Admiral". Now, he's more respectable - a member of the Royal Fine Arts Commission and, more recently, the Royal Academy.

He intends to teach architecture at the Academy for the first time in a century. But his master classes will be for decision-makers - government ministers, civil servants, property developers - who "don't understand what architecture is and yet are making decisions about it all the time".

The Royal Fine Arts Commission is due to be "rubbed out" later this year, as Mr Ritchie says: "It's a very English cricket game and what it does is perceived to be anachronistic". However, he believes there is a need for some independent body to give a second opinion, rather than act as an arbiter, on major projects.

His own work includes the great central hall at the new Leipzig trade fair; 240 metres long and 80 metres wide, it has been billed as "the biggest glass palace in the world". He has also designed a new crystal palace on the old Crystal Palace site in London - a massive scheme held up by eco-warriors and legal action.

Through RFR (Rice Francis Ritchie), he worked with Dundalk-born Peter Rice, the most brilliant engineer Ireland ever produced, on the Grand Louvre. One of their tasks was to build a full-scale model of the pyramid for Mitterand, Chirac and I.M. Pei to inspect, before it was finally approved in 1984; it stood for just 12 hours.

Of course, there was controversy. But Ian Ritchie says the true meaning of this word is "the ability to make people rethink". Everyone now admires the pyramid, even though few people in France understood that it was "all about socialists putting a knife into Louis XIV". Jack Lang, then Minister for Culture, told him so.

"The French have an expression: `nothing is ever achieved without a scandal'. Look back to Eiffel. He put his own money into the tower and his construction company went bust and had to be bailed out by the banks. Yet when north African terrorism started 10 years ago, it was the first thing in Paris to be protected".

He describes O'Connell Street as "dinky", compared to the Champs Elysses, and says he followed the "debate" about his competition-winning design for the Pillar site by reading Letters to the Editor on the Irish Times Internet site. He was more bemused than anything else by the urge of Dubliners to come up with a nickname for it.

Mr Ritchie remembers spending a weekend in Dublin in 1990. The developer of Stockley Park, on the M4 near Heathrow Airport, had been so impressed with his firm's work that he offered to take all 45 of them out to lunch in a restaurant of their choice. "I said 'Four Seasons, New York'. Dublin was where we ended up".

It was a great weekend, though he admits that he still finds it difficult to "read" Irish people. "I used to say to Peter Rice that Ireland had bypassed the Industrial Revolution and gone from agriculture to the electronic age in one leap. Now there's a sense of an Irish renaissance, a sort of coming home".

What struck him was the importance of "marking a spot, capturing the sky and the light and doing it in an extraordinary way". He had also "sensed from the brief that there was a genuine desire for something out of the ordinary". So that is what he designed, a stainless steel spire rising to 120 metres (nearly 400 feet).

"I got out what I thought was the essence of this time in Ireland, in Dublin", he says. "The competition brief didn't demand a symbol of anything, but I felt that the aspirations of Irish people now could be captured in this spire that reaches for the sky. And the territory it takes up is so small - just 10 square metres".

He sees the height as a measure of the "scale of intent" behind the project and not as a precedent for other tall structures in the city. His own conviction that it is "right" for the old Pillar site was not based on the "arrogance of the architect" but on his sense of Ireland and where it stands.

As for those who wonder what this wand has to do with Dublin, he has an answer, too. "The fact is that I would not have designed this if it wasn't Irish. The physicality of it hints at the sky, the light, the Celtic spiral. But in the end I felt it was unique enough to say it becomes Irish simply by being here".

Based on preliminary tenders, there is a potential Irish contractor. But the contract needs to be placed by April 9th to guarantee its "slot" in British Steel's production schedule, otherwise hopes of an end-of-year completion will be dashed. Safety will be secured by a "fatigue lifecycle" lasting 500 years.

Ian Ritchie's experience of Ireland has not been entirely positive. He won two recent competitions with his design for a new bridge in Cork, but says the project was "blocked" by the Institution of Engineers of Ireland. "They got upset, even though we were working with Ove Arup's office in Cork," he says.

Current projects include a new headquarters in Strasbourg for Arte, the French-German TV channel; the British national rowing centre in London, part of its bid for the 2008 Olympics, and a social housing scheme for the east end of Glasgow. He has also won a competition to design power pylons in France, in the form of a lower-case "f".

Ian Ritchie Architects are also finishing work on London Underground's Jubilee Line, and planning the redevelopment of White City, where the BBC used to be located. What its sole principal would really like to do, however, is to set up an institute of mavericks: "there aren't enough around."