Le Ricolais, Robert, 1894-1977

Born in La Roche-sur-Yon, France, in 1894, George Robert Le Ricolais studied and worked in his native country until 1951. At that date he started his academic career in the United States, leading structures workshops at the University of Illinois-Urbana, the University of North Carolina, Harvard, the University of Michigan, and the University of Pennsylvania. In 1954 he joined the faculty of Penn's Department of Architecture in the Graduate School of Fine Arts. He was appointed to the Paul Philippe Cret chair in 1974, and taught until he retired in 1975. He died in Paris in 1977.

Le Ricolais's importance to the field of structural engineering derives mostly from publications on his experimental structures and on his "way of thinking" during twenty years of research at the University of Pennsylvania. His belief that he had "found no better discipline in this unpredictable problem of form, than to observe the prodigies created by nature," led to his studies of soap-films and radiolariae. His observation that "it is an enormous reservoir of unexploited forms, mathematics and its symbols," led to his unique use of topology. Being against "people eating symbols all day," and believing that "the contact with things is full of meaning," he insisted on the building and testing of physical models of all concepts. His use of the paradox as a logical construct meant that in his structures, "the order of destruction should follow the order of its construction," and that in his studies for the partition of urban space he proposed that "the future objective is not how to structure buildings but how to structure circulations."