and as you quite rightly pointed out in that thread, Takesh h, mere photos will not explain the importance or influence of these great engineers.
As there is precious little info about him online, i thought id gather what i could here in this thread, to give props to whom i think was the most creative and innovative engineer of the 20th century.
He was responsible for building some of the greatest achievements in architecture such as the Sydney Opera House, The Pompidou Centre and The Louvre Pyramid.
Renzo Piano once said " Peter Rice was one of those engineers who has greatly contributed to architecture, reaffirming the deep creative interconnection between humanism and science, between art and technology,"
Incidently, I am from the same town and attended the same school that Rice did and am embarrased to say that his legacy is not particulary acknowledged there, except for a small sign on the house where he lived.

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Sydney Opera House Born in Dundalk Co. Louth, Peter Rice spent most of his childhood between the town of Dundalk, and the villages of Gyles Quay and Inniskeen. He was educated at the local CBS before going to Newbridge College and then on to Queen's University Belfast. He originally started to study Aeronautical Engineering but he found it uninteresting and switched to Civil Engineering. After he received his primary degree, he spent a year at Imperial College in London before joining Ove Arup and Partners in 1956 to work on the Sydney Opera House."

At Arup he was part of a small team which worked for three years to figure out a way to built Utzon's shells. After three years working on the project in London, he moved to Sydney to be assistant engineer to Ian MacKenzie. After one month MacKenzie fell ill and was hospitalised, leaving Rice in total charge. At the age of 28, he was resident engineer on one of the world's most recognisable buildings. He was responsible with a surveyor Mike Elphick for the survey and positioning of all the shell elements and tiles.

"Before Syndey I had a very primitive appreciation of architecture. Life in rural Ireland in the 1950s had given few clues to what it was all about, so I came to the experience innocently, like blotting paper ready to absorb any information which came my way."

After the completion of the Opera House, he spent eighteen months in the United States - six months in New York and a year at Cornell where he was a visiting scholar. He returned to England in 1968 and worked with Structures 3 at Arups where the principal client was Frei Otto.



Archiseek
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In 1971 the French government announced a competition for the centre of Paris. Structures 3 had been previously introduced to Richard Rogers by Frei Otto.

"As we sat thinking we realized that a good reason for entering competitions is not to win them but to explore relationships and design. Of course one can hope to win but, particularly when it is an open competition - there were 687 entries from Beaubourg - to set out to win is in a sense self-defeating, because it will induce a conservative and tentative approach and the principal factor will not to offend. With that in mind we approached Richard Rogers, who had just set up a joint partnership with Renzo Piano, and asked then if they would be willing to enter the competition with us. After some hesitation and indecision they decided to proceed."

According to Rice, Piano and Rogers had a clear idea of the building and image that they wanted - an idea based on the ideas of Archigram and Cedric Price.

"It was a large loose-fit frame where anything could happen. An information machine. At its core was the belief, which had been identified in the brief, that culture should not be elitest, that culture should be like any other form of information: open to all in a friendly, classless environment. Once the architectural idea, the large open steel framework, had started to gel, our job, in one page, was to design the framework."

"Doing the competition was fun. It was all done quickly near the end, so there wasn't any time for the fun to get lost. This is an important point about competitions, especially open ones. The entry was not become too deliberate or too detailed, or too closely argued a response to the brief, because the jury will only have the briefest of time with each entry. It is the idea that they will see and the spirit of the drawings."

On 13th July 1971 they won the competition. The core of the team made it to Paris that evening where they were feted by the government and the jury. Over the next few days, the remainder of the team arrived. Only Rice believed. He was the only person who believed at this stage that it could be built.

According to Bryan Appleyard's biography of Richard Rogers "....he was the calmest man in Paris on that critical weekend. He knew that the building would be built and Sydney had taught him that you pace such projects long. In this case, for example, he knew that they had to make time for themselves."

"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.
A year later he moved to Paris. He had found it too difficult trying to monitor progress from London. Again according to Appleyard, "In this context, Rice - along with two other engineers, Lennart Grut and Tom Barker - was the best possible partner for Piano and Rogers. First, because his thinking was strategic; he clearly defined problems in all areas, not just engineering, more clearly than anyone else. Secondly, because he was sensitive to what they were trying to do; he did not, for example, try to talk them out of the 150-foot span in spite of the huge problems it created in the design of the steel trusses." Archiseek

In sharp contrast to the standardized and anonymous systems of construction of much modern architecture, Peter Rice and his colleagues worked together to create designs which explored those materials to articulate innovative systems of structure. In their detailed designs, those systems have also been developed to refer to their making and clearly denote what the French would call trace de la main. It was this quality which Peter sought to achieve in the projects he worked on. In discussing the design of Centre Pompidou he observed that:

ts extensive use of cast steel, an early industrial product still much in use today, is an attempt to introduce a material into building construction to change the way building is perceived. It is an example of the use of new materials to change the feeling and scale of a large and monumental building. The piazza facade of this building has nothing to decorate it but structural elements.

By using the castings as the main building joints the shapes and form were liberated from the standard industrial language. The public could see the individual design preference. Modern computers and analysis techniques and modern testing methods made this possible. We were back to the freedom of our Victorian forefathers. The individual details were exploited to give a personal design philosophy full rein. The final design was of course the work of more than one person. Many architects, engineers, and craftsmen at the foundry contributed to the actual shape of each piece. And each piece was subject to the rigours of detailed structural analysis to ensure that it was fit for its purpose in every way and this too influenced the shape and final configuration. But this does not matter. The pieces are indeed better for all the different expertise which went into their make-up. They are more logical, more self-evidently correct in their form. What matters is that they are free of the industrial tyranny. They require people to look and perceive so that they may understand. This brings to mind another myth about technology. The feeling that technological choice is always the result of a predetermined logic. The feeling that there is a correct solution to a technical question is very common. But a technical solution like any other decision is a moment in time. It is not definitive. The decision is the result of a complex process where a lot of information is analysed and examined and choices made on the evidence. It is a moment in time and place where the people, their background and their talent is paramount. What is often missing is the evidence of human intervention, the black box syndrome. So by looking at new materials, or at old materials in a new way we change the rules. People become visible again.

II Journal
Attached Images In 1977 after the completion of the Pompidou Centre, he set up his own practice RPR (along with Martin Francis and Ian Ritchie) although he continued to work for Arups as a partner. This contributed to his workload and huge output. 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 Cité des Sciences at La Villette and the tent-like canopy that softens the monumentality of the Grand Arche at La Défense.

In 1985 he was asked by I.M. Pei to help in his projects at the Louvre in Paris. Rice engineered the shell structures for the glass roofs that Pei wanted to cover inner courtyards turning them into internal spaces.

By now he was firmly established at the forefront of engineering and was in great demand, working with architects such as Richard Rogers, I.M. Pei, Norman Foster, Ian Ritchie, Kenzo Tange, Paul Andreu, and Renzo Piano. The projects he worked on varied widely from Toronto's Opera House by Moshe Safdie to Kansai's International Airport, one of numerous projects with the Renzo Piano Building Workshop. Following their close collaboration over many years, the famous Italian architect, Renzo Piano, commented that: "Peter Rice made a great contribution to anchor the art of architecture to real life, real science, and real modernity."

In 1992 he was awarded the RIBA Gold Medal for Architecture, the second engineer to receive it (after Ove Arup and Renzo Piano), and the second Irishman after Michael Scott. The Royal Gold Medal for the promotion of architecture was inaugurated by Queen Victoria in 1848 and is conferred by the Sovereign annually on a distinguished architect or person "whose work has promoted, either directly or indirectly, the advancement of architecture." In late 1991, he was diagnosed with a brain tumour. He died on 25 October 1992 aged fifty-seven.
Questioning the role of the engineer On receiving the Royal Gold Medal, Peter Rice drew attention to W. H. Auden’s essay, “Joker in the Pack.” Auden had analyzed the role of Iago in Shakespeare’s Othello, suggesting that he had destroyed the love of Othello and Desdemona by rational argument; Peter went on to observe that many people tended to attribute that same role to the engineer in the process of architecture and design.

His own work dispelled that view. Inspired by Ove Arup, his colleagues in the office, and the unique way of working which Arup had established there, Peter Rice’s passion for design was fired by an enthusiasm to develop ideas through collaborative effort. This approach was rooted in a view that such collaborations would lead to wide-ranging explorations of design, materials and ways of making which would transform engineering and architecture. Unlike the engineer in Victorian England -- who frequently collaborated with client, architect, fabricator, and contractor to experiment with materials and systems of assembly in the design of fundamentally new building types -- both architect and engineer today are frequently absorbed in predictable, and often discrete, routines of design which are dominated by corporate industry. For Peter this was repressive and limiting.

As an engineer, he prompted change through his collaborations and the tenacious exploration of materials. His fundamental re- examination of the characteristics of the familiar -- stone, glass, and timber -- as well as careful studies of the potential of the new lightweight structures, such as polycarbonate and fabric, led to the discovery of new ways of designing and constructing buildings. In commenting on the way present day society lives and builds, Peter argued:

We must use industrial techniques. Components become industrial elements which are used and re-used to create giant facades. Similar buildings multiply over the landscape and the building components dominate the architecture and the growth and power of technology is given the blame. To counteract this architects and designers have returned to the forms and images of old. But to do this misses the point and the problem. What is needed is something which returns the human scale and human involvement to buildings. It is the feeling that people are unimportant when compared to the industrial process which is so damaging. The Victorians succeeded where we do not.

Industry and its power and capacity were new to them. Designers enjoyed the freedom to experiment, to enjoy themselves, to innovate, to explore the possibilities of this new power to manufacture and create. It can be seen in the best of those buildings which survive. Go to the Grand Palais in Paris and one marvels that it is so fine and that we have failed to do as well since. And that is or should be surprising. We have learned so much about steel and glass and how structures work since then. Where has the knowledge gone? Has it become smothered by industry and desire to standardise? I believe so.

The Havard Graduate School of Design have a Peter Rice Prize

"This prize was established in 1994 in recognition of the ideals and principles represented by the late eminent engineer Peter Rice. The prize honors students of exceptional promise in the school's architecture and advanced degree programs who have proven their competence and innovation in advancing architecture and structural engineering."

[ 本帖最后由 womafia 于 2011-1-6 12:00 编辑 ]