Paul Ritter (architect)

In 1983, the Federal police commenced an investigation into whether he had attempted to mislead the export grants board. The investigation included interviews with his overseas business associates and contacts, and led to Ritter’s arrest in August 1984. He received a 3-year prison sentence, of which he served 16 months in Fremantle and Karnet. Paul Ritter maintained that he was framed, but his appeal was dismissed in 1986, and he abandoned an appeal to the High Court of Australia. After his release he published Curses From Canberra: public service conspiracy and the failure of democratic safeguards. The imprisonment and subsequent efforts by the export board and tax office to force repayment of funds led to the bankruptcy of Ritter and his wife.

In 1971, he was appointed by the state Minister for Town Planning (H. E. Graham) to report on the MRPA proposals for the Corridor Plan for Perth; however his report had little impact.

In the Supreme Court Gardens in central Perth, his sculpture "The Ore Obelisk" (1971) symbolises the diversity of mining industry from which Western Australia's wealth is largely derived.

During the late 1970 and early 1980s, Ritter became increasingly focussed on the promotion of a patented concrete moulding method he called “Sculpcrete”. Ritter's business activities associated with this invention led to serious financial problems and ultimately, a conviction for fraud. In promoting his concrete technology overseas, Ritter had sought to obtain reimbursements for expenses under the Commonwealth government export grants program. After several successful claims, extensive investigations by the export board led to his subsequent applications being denied. His family would later acknowledge that whilst his business practices had been questionable, he had always maintained that if he was doing anything wrong, the board would simply disallow the claims.

With his public profile bolstered by his dismissal, five months later Ritter was able to return to the City of Perth as a councillor for the East Ward. From 1968 to 1986 he would become a prominent figure during the decline and subsequent transition of East Perth. As a councillor he showed concern for the amenity of East Perth, encouraging improvements to programs of street-sweeping and rubbish-removal, and seeking to involve the community in the decision-making process.

In 1968 and 1970, Paul Ritter was involved in the design of the subdivisions of Rockingham Park in Rockingham, and Crestwood Estate in Thornlie, Western Australia. To these he introduced Radburn principles. Every house sits on the edge of a park, and movement on foot through the development via pedestrian underpasses is possible without encountering vehicles.

In 1967, he was controversially sacked. Ostensibly Ritter was accused by the City Council of failing to produce the statutory planning scheme that was required by the Metropolitan Region Planning Authority (MRPA). The MRPA had been formed in 1963 to convert the Stephenson-Hepburn Plan for the Metropolitan Region into a statutory scheme for the whole of Perth. The relationship between the MRPA's Chief Planner, David Carr and Paul Ritter soon began to deteriorate. Perth historian Jenny Gregory believes the falling out was due to the state government's (and Carr's) view that the role of the PCC was to fill in the details of the overarching metropolitan scheme. Ritter himself insisted that, despite some personal animosity, "the one and only major contention" between the two was regarding the Government Freeway Plan, which Carr backed and Ritter vigorously opposed.

Following his sacking in 1967, a committee comprising Sir Walter Murdoch, Mary Durack Miller, Stella O'Keefe, Professor E. K. Braybrooke, Professor G. C. Bolton, Thomas Wardle and Dr. R. B. Lefroy was formed to inquire into the dismissal. He later successfully sued for wrongful dismissal.

Retiring in 1965, Green was unable to have his preferred candidate appointed City CEO, and his replacement, G. O. Edwards, was a man whom Ritter felt was inadequate, and who lacked the experience and ability to keep councillors in order and staff loyal and committed.

Mr. W. A. McI. Green, Town Clerk of Perth City Council (PCC), invited Ritter to head the council's newly formed Department of Planning. Ritter accepted, and after migrating with his family to Perth in late 1964, began work as Perth's first City Planner in May of the following year.

Jane Jacobs's 1961 work The Death and Life of Great American Cities was criticised by many modernist planners and architects of the time, Paul Ritter included. He called her a "muddle-headed influence in planning" and declared that she should never have had the chance to put her ideas forward. Her book was a "shallow analysis of planning problems" and she undermined the best planning practices by taking no account of changes to the car, to the environment and to the modern city. He ridiculed her "confused thinking" and insistence upon streets and small blocks over the superblock for which he was an advocate in his 1964 work, Planning for Man and Motor:

In the early 1960s, Ritter was teaching at the Nottingham School of Architecture while acquiring an international reputation as an architectural theorist with new ideas and unquenchable energy. His 1964 book, Planning for Man and Motor contained his theories and advocacy for the separation of pedestrians and cars and brought him to the attention of the global planning profession. He was recognised as a world authority on town planning matters. A world tour in promotion of this book brought him to Perth, a city for which he expressed great enthusiasm.

Throughout their life, the couple would combine their talents, shared interests and idealism in an enduring professional partnership which they named 'The Planned Environment and Educreation Research (PEER) Institute'. Together they wrote and published their first book in 1959 entitled The Free Family, describing how they applied their beliefs about child-rearing to their own children.

From 1954 to 1964, Paul and Jean Ritter ran the Ritter Press in Nottingham, where Paul taught at the School of Architecture from 1952 to 1964, when the School moved to the University, and a new professor was appointed.

Between 1954 and 1964, Ritter Press mainly published the journal Orgonomic Functionalism, devoted to the work of Wilhelm Reich, which appeared in 38 issues in 10 volumes. Paul Ritter was the editor and main contributor. Reich did not accept him as his follower, and wrote in a letter to A. S. Neill: "He claims now to establish the TRUE Functionalism. I am a kind of precursor. He is ending in utter confusion." After Reich's death in 1957 Ritter edited a Reich Memorial Volume with contributions by the Ritters, Neill, Nic Waal, and the later Reich biographer Myron Sharaf.

Paul Ritter (6 April 1925 – 14 June 2010) was a Western Australian architect, town planner, sociologist, artist and author. In his roles as the first city planner of the City of Perth and subsequent two decades spent serving as Councillor for East Perth, Ritter is remembered as a brilliant, eccentric and often controversial public figure who consistently fought to preserve and enhance the character and vitality of the central city district. Today he is primarily remembered for his involvement in preserving many of Perth's heritage buildings at a time of rapid redevelopment and preventing the construction of an eight-lane freeway on the Swan River foreshore. Ritter's later career was blighted by a 3-year prison sentence for making misleading statements in applying for export marketing grants.

Ritter was born in Prague on 6 April 1925 to Jewish parents Carl Ritter and Elsa (née Schnabel). In 1939, at the age of 13, Ritter was evacuated from Czechoslovakia to England via the Kindertransport. He graduated as a Bachelor of Architecture and Master of Civic Design from the University of Liverpool. In 1946 he married fellow-graduate Jean Patricia Finch with whom he eventually had five daughters and two sons.