AIAEB Lecture Series: Institutional

Kit carries on a three-generation family tradition in the practice of architecture and is the Chairman of the Board of the firm his grandfather founded in 1906, Ratcliff. As the visionary thought leader of the firm for over 30 years, Kit continues to expand the ways the firm can bring value to their clients and beyond. He brought Lean thinking to the firm 20 years ago, which has since become a mainstream technique, and he developed a number of tools for sustainable design. Kit spent most of his career designing non-living systems – architecture – for living communities, with the goal of improving their lives in a sustainable relationship with the earth. In the last ten years, he has found a more profound and powerful way to accomplish this goal: working with people in their places from a living systems perspective, to develop ways they can add value to human, social, natural, built and financial capitals.

Typically, people maximize one or more of these capitals in their endeavors, at the expense of other capitals. In the living systems approach, there is a commitment to lifting up all five capitals – one identifies and develops new ways which lift up the living systems which certainly includes architecture and the built environment, but sees them as supporting systems whose function is to contribute to vitality and viability in the living systems that use them. Kit has studied Regenerative Design with the Regenesis Group, an internationally known alliance of interdisciplinary experts from around the world, practicing within the living systems approach.