Architecture and car design are inextricable, although the styles employed rarely leak from one discipline to the next. True, the architecture critic Jonathan Meades once morosely described Robert Opron’s Citroën CX as ‘the last Gothic car’. And Thomas Ingenlath’s Polestars look, from some angles, like a John Pawson sketch for a minimalist bathroom in Tokyo. But I am wondering whether there may be something else, something more fundamental, in the urge to make both buildings and machines. Something that operates at a pre-intellectual, perhaps even genetic level. And this is how I came to be thinking about Harry Ricardo (1885-1974), whose academic study of flame-paths in enclosed vessels led to an understanding of the composition of petrol that, in turn, led to ‘octane’ categorisation. Octane? A useful word! And here we all are.
Ricardo, a descendant of Sephardic Jews from Portugal long-settled here, had a distinguished family: an ancestor was the author of the 1817 best-seller On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation. When Harry was 20, his father, the architect Halsey Ricardo (1854-1928), was completing a house in Holland Park for the department store tycoon Ernest Ridley Debenham. It is clad in Royal Doulton Carrara tiles and Burmantofts bricks.
Halsey moved in Arts and Crafts circles. He was a friend of Edward Burne-Jones, the Pre-Raphaelite painter of sultry women oozing the scent and opportunity of forbidden sex in a lush conservatory dense with ferns and sin. You can’t not notice these things, but Harry also learned technical skills from his mother’s family, who were successful civil engineers.
If any genius politician tries to argue about the relevance and utility of experts, I would tell the Harry Ricardo story. He was born when mechanical engineering was evolving from being a craft to a technology and he artfully combined the two. Just as Leonardo thought medicine an art and art a science, Ricardo was enthralled by unconstrained creative thinking. Aged ten, he acquired a screw-cutting lathe. At Rugby School, he made a steam-powered pushbike when his chums were chasing balls. By the time he went to Cambridge in 1903, Ricardo was already an accomplished engine builder with special knowledge of sleeve valves. Concepts of detonation, swirl and knocking were not abstract theory, but became lively evidence
