RIBA Gordon Ricketts Fund
We are now accepting applications to the 2024 cycle of the RIBA Gordon Ricketts Fund.
The RIBA Gordon Ricketts Fund was launched in 1968, in memory of Gordon Ricketts, Secretary of the RIBA from 1959 until his death in 1968. It is offered biennially to provide grants for RIBA staff to pursue research in a personal field of interest related to architecture.
Past and present members of staff at the RIBA can apply for up to £2,000 to complete their chosen research project.
Important details about this fund:
1. This research does not need to be connected to an applicant’s work at the RIBA.
2. Applicants are not required to have any research experience in the field of architecture.
3. Research proposals should have clear goals and the personal benefits of undertaking the research should be outlined in the application.
4. The funding may be used to cover expenses incurred in pursuit of the project, or it may be used to provide temporary cover for a member of staff on unpaid leave from the institute (please discuss this with your line manager and HR in advance).
5. If you are a current employee, your application needs to be endorsed by your line manager. Your line manager will need to complete the approval form available below and submit this separately.
How to apply
Please read the guidance notes (PDF) in full before submitting your online application.
Access the online application form
You will need to follow the instructions to register for an account first, and then select the ‘RIBA Gordon Ricketts Memorial Fund’ form to begin your application. You will receive an automatic email notification upon submission of your application.
If you are a current RIBA employee, please ask your Line Manager to complete the Line Manager Approval Form and email this separately to sophie.arp@riba.org.
The deadline for applications is 3pm (BST) Friday 14 June 2024. Applications will not be accepted after this time.
If you have any questions about the application process or would like to discuss a project proposal, please get in touch at research.funding@riba.org.
2022 recipients
In the 2022 application cycle, we were able to award a total of £2,669.50 to support two projects:
Paddy Gould
The Architectural Plan in Domestic Dreamspace
For most people, the awareness of how architecture affects and facilitates psychological and physical worlds was heightened after the Covid-19 pandemic of 2020-2023, particularly in the domicile. These are sites where we imagine ourselves as individuals, as families, and as communities. For some of us, our space suddenly appeared too small for our needs, and many homes were then adapted to accommodate such a shift. This research investigates specific idiosyncratic cases (including the Neolithic settlement at Skara Brae, architect/owners Jane and Mary Parminter’s extraordinary octagonal home A La Ronde, adaptive architectural propositions, and the extreme interior/exterior transformation of ‘outsider’ artists’ homes) to illustrate how personal worlds exist inside architectural spaces. Ultimately, I intend to undertake a poetically driven investigation into the complex links between the architectural plan, functional and accumulative ornament, and creative dreaming within lived architectural space.
Rodrigo Orrantia Gomez
Global Explorers: Architecture and the Dawn of Modernity through the Lens of Early Photography 1839-1900
This research project focuses of the earliest images of the buildings of colonial outposts across the world, with a specific interest in the Americas, China, and the Far East. I am interested in an early photographic process called Daguerreotype, as the images crated through it are the first direct evidence of how the world looked at the dawn of modernity through the eyes of global explorers.
My aim is to research three of the foremost Daguerreotype collections in the world, which are located in France at the National Library, the Musee D’Orsay and the Musee Du Quai Branly. The Fund will allow me the opportunity to examine these very rare and delicate photographic images (some dating back to the 1840s) and study them as original cultural objects that construed the concepts of modernity, colonial history, and national identity as we understand them today
Previous recipients
2020
Matthew Dowell - Dreamland: The Development of the British Seaside in the Twentieth Century
Kate Hunter - An Exploration of Spatial Design in Virtual Environments within Online Immersive Events
Liam Peacock - Architecture of Maintenance and Mobility
Chloe Spiby Loh - Orientalism as Othering
Read the report submitted to the RIBA by Chloe Spiby Loh at the end of 2020 project (PDF).
2018
Jonathan Baker - The Old in the New: Comparing the Symbolic Use of Spolia and Reclaimed Materials in Late Antique and Contemporary Architecture
Paul Overend - LGBTQ Spaces and Places: A Look at the Architectural History of the Vernacular
Wilson Yau - A Legacy in Paper and Stone: How te Architecture, Culture and Urban Planning of Cities from Liverpool to Shanghai Were Shaped by the British Empire and its Architects
Read more about Wilson's project.
2016
Thomas Mills - Portrait of an Industry: Scotch Whisky Distilleries and their Communities
Michèle Woodger - Letter-Cutting in London: A Database of Hand-Carved Lettering in London
2014
Ruth Hynes - Industrial Heritage and Urban Place-Making: The Impact of Twentieth Century Industrial Architecture on Shaping Urban Space
Katherine Pelton - 50 Years Later: The Legacy of the New Towns Act (1946)
2012
Valeria Carullo - Rationalism on Set: Architecture, Cinema and Photography in 1930s Italy
Rebecca Robert-Hughes - A Case Study of Chandigarh, to Examine the Influence of Georges Bataille's Theory of Transgression on the Work of Le Corbusier
Get in touch
If you would like to know more about any of the projects listed above, please get in touch.
