Ricardo, Halsey Ralph

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Ricardo, Halsey Ralph (1854–1928). English architect of Portuguese-Dutch Jewish descent. He established his practice in 1878, and from 1888 to 1898 was in partnership with William Frend de Morgan (1839–1917), for whom he designed relief tiles, vases, and other artefacts. Ricardo advocated the use of faïence and other glazed materials to resist the depredations of the polluted atmospheres of the C19 city, suggesting that coloured materials would supply the equivalents of shadows and halftones provided by cornices, pilasters, and mouldings. In this, he anticipated the designs of Otto Wagner in Vienna, who used coloured tiles set in the same planes as walls and piers to suggest architectural features. He designed several buildings, of which the best were the Howrah Station, Calcutta, India (1901—with a glowing exterior of brick and coloured tiles), and 8 Addison Road, Kensington (1905–8), completely faced with impervious glazed materials, even the roof-tiles. He was an Arts-and-Crafts architect, whose work was extraordinarily sensitive, imaginative, and original. Among his works his own house, ‘Woodside’, Graffham, near Petworth, Sussex (1905), deserves note.

Bibliography

A. S. Gray (1985);
Jervis (1984);
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004);
Sheppard (ed.) (1973)

A Dictionary of Architecture and Landscape Architecture

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