Molendinar Lecture 2025: Ian Ritchie CBE in Conversation

This year’s Molendinar Lecture will be held at Glasgow’s City Chambers on Wednesday 22 October. Departing from our usual format, this year’s event will feature Ian Ritchie in conversation with Neil Baxter.

Professor Ian Ritchie, CBE leads ritchie*studio, recognised as one of the world’s most thoughtful, innovative and influential architectural practices. Author of some of the world’s most iconic and influential buildings of recent decades he holds several professorships and has received over 100 major awards. Among his many projects and awards, the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Courtyard Theatre received both the American Institute of Architects Award and the RIBA Award, the latter of which he also won for the Susie Sainsbury Theatre and the Angela Burgess Recital Hall at the Royal Academy of Music. He was the first foreign architect to receive the French Academie d’Architecture Grand Silver Medal for Innovation.

He is a Fellow of the Society of Façade Engineering, and Honorary Fellow of the Royal Incorporation of Architects in Scotland, American Institute of Architects, Royal Academy of Music, Royal Academy of Engineering and elected member of UCL Natural Sciences Club. He is currently advisor to Backstage Trust (performing arts), ambassador for Global Returns Project (climate charity), patron of Hawksmoor300, and formerly advisor to the IDBE Course Cambridge University, Centre for Urban Science and Progress NYU, the President of Columbia University, The Ove Arup Foundation, The Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851, RSC, Lord Chancellor, British, Natural History, and National Maritime museums.

In addition to his prolific U.K. and international architectural practice, Ian Ritchie is an artist, furniture designer, printmaker and published poet.

Neil Baxter has served variously as principal in his own practice, CEO of a major professional institute and Co-Director of Baxter/Jardine Ltd, a publishing company with offices in Glasgow and Berlin.

Know what’s Happening Next — before everyone else does.

Get App

Host or Publisher the St Mungo Festival