More than just another structure, The Morning Line offers a new form for artistic and architectural integration that will be progressively reconfigured and developed for the Venice Architecture Biennale, "Out There, Architecture Beyond Buildings," (September 15, 2008) and the 2008 Seville Biennale (October 2008 – January 2009) and then continues to travel to other venues.

The Morning Line is both ruin and monument, the blackened frame of a cathedral-like structure; a drawing in and of space; an ‘anti-pavilion’. Unlike traditional architectural pavilions, it takes the form of an open cellular structure rather than an enclosure, basing its eloquent visual language on a radical cosmological theory developed by Paul Steinhardt and Neil Turok. Built from an idealized "universal bit" that can be reconfigured in to multiple architectural forms, The Morning Line uses fractal cycles to build a model of the universe that scales up and down. The architectural and engineering systems capitalize on recent developments in parametric design developed by Arup AGU, and push them to their limits.

“This synthetic process is accomplished chiefly through drawing, where form and content, geometry and expression can become one. This is partly in answer to the holographic principle that the visible universe can be understood as a hologram, isomorphic to the information inscribed on its boundaries. In other words, the universe is a kind of picture.” (Ritchie)

A new kind of architectural form: structure as language

Thematically, the structure unifies a group of interrelated ideas from disciplines as diverse as architecture, physics, music, linguistics, theology and art. Manifesting and integrating some of these ideas has previously been discussed as a theoretical possibility but no structure has ever been built specifically to express them together. A few attempts have been made: most notably the 1958 Philips Pavilion designed by Iannis Xenakis constructed with the hyperbolic shapes Xenakis used for his composition “Metastaseis” and scored by Edgard Varèse.

For The Morning Line the structure and composition have evolved together rather than as separate but complementary forms and the narrative, architectural and musical forms are intended to be integrated, exploratory, modular and collaborative rather than confrontational, monolithic and disjunctive. Traditional architecture divides into two forms; Traditional early buildings are typically called tectonic. Their structural form is a stacked vernacular material such as stone or wood, that can only be articulated along structural axes to express content – for example a Roman civic structure, Gothic cathedral or Hindu temple. Visual content, no matter how radical, is therefore restricted to progressive processions, across or through the stacking system. Modern buildings are typically stereo-tectonic; updated tents, where an independent frame supports an artificial skin that may or may not, arbitrarily reflect the content of the building.

Ritchie already had a history of working on architectural projects with the architects Thom Mayne and Kevin Roche when he approached Aranda/Lasch) with a proposal for a modular, reconfigurable performance structure that would not simply be a drawing in space but a new visual language – as described in the linguistic theory of semasiographics. In their theoretical projects; Tooling and Grotto, Aranda/Lasch and Arup AGU had explored complex stacking and connection systems that would allow a structure to proliferate in many directions.