Professor Ric Russell, the founding partner of Dundee's well-known architecture practice, Nicoll Russell Studios was awarded an OBE for services to architecture in the Queen's Birthday Honours List. Ric's fellow partners Doug Binnie and Andy Baxter commented that "everyone in the practice is absolutely delighted that Ric's tireless efforts and enthusiasm have been rewarded in this way. In today's world it would be very easy for someone like Ric to drift away to more enticing or lucrative areas further south, so it is a testament to his tenacious qualities that everything he has achieved has been generated here in Dundee. He has always striven to maximise the potential of often humdrum requirements to create something which is both timeless and unique.

Ric Russell

This drive and passion has led the practice to have a national if not international reputation. It has received over 40 national and Scottish awards including 8 RIBA Awards, Dynamic Place Awards, 4 Regeneration Scotland Awards and a Special RIBA Award.

Throughout the practice's 21-year history, he has always underlined to all of us, the importance of creating buildings and solutions for the general public and the people who actually use them. This approach has created an architectural "style", if we have one, which has received much public acclaim as well as professional coverage, but is slightly adrift of the "mainstream" architectural avant garde. This can be no better illustrated than at the Whitetop Centre, Dundee which was developed for profoundly disabled and institutionalised young adults. Ric's response to the client's brief and his care for those who need the building has created a unique sensory environment which hopefully triggers the often intangible senses of its clients and catalyses the efforts of their carers.

Sometimes it feels that it would be far easier and rewarding to be "fashionable", but that is far removed from Ric's and our practice's ethos.

At times like this it is easier to reflect upon the successes of the practice and the important role Ric, the Studios and our projects have had within Scotland's recent architectural renaissance. Project's like the Grianan Building on Dundee's Technology Park, have to be seen as seminal works within the Scottish architectural scene. Its ground breaking composition of glass and rural materials like rubble walling, exposed timber and metalwork was completed in 1988. It is easy to establish a clear lineage of buildings and architects, which that approach influenced across Scotland over the subsequent years.

Ric has quietly built up a highly regarded portfolio of work in Tayside and beyond whilst some of his contemporaries have perhaps preferred more limelight. Beyond his work in the practice he has made an enormous, though unpublicised, impact on Scottish architecture through his teaching, work at the former RFACS and now at Architecture Design Scotland, participation in awards committees and his presence and foresight across a raft of other activities.