STEPHEN BAYLEY

The Aesthete

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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 flamepaths 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 longsettled 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.