Joseph Rykwert (Warsaw, Poland, April 5, 1926 - London, UK, October 18, 2024) was a prominent architectural historian, and author of numerous books on the subject. Son of Elizabeth Melup and Szymon Rykwert, he was born in Warsaw in 1926 and moved to England in 1939, on the eve of the Second World War. Rykwert was educated at Charter House School, the Bartlett School of Architecture (University College London), and the Architectural Association in London.
He initially taught at the Hammersmith School of Arts & Crafts and later at the Ulm School of Design from 1958, later becoming a librarian and tutor at the Royal College of Art from 1961 to 1967, where he obtained his PhD. He was a Professor of Art at the University of Essex, a post he held from 1967 to 1980 when he moved to Cambridge to serve initially as Slade Professor of Fine Art and then as Professor of Architecture. Here Rykwert continued his influential master's program, taught by architecture critic Dalibor Vesely. In 1988 Rykwert was appointed Paul Philippe Cret Professor of Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, a position he held until 1998; he was professor emeritus. He was also a visiting professor at prestigious universities and taught, throughout his career, a whole generation of historians and architectural theorists.
Some of his best-known publications are:: The Judicious Eye: Architecture Against the Other Arts (2008); The Seduction of Place: The City in the Twenty-First Century (2004); Body and Building: Essays on the Changing Relation of Body and Architecture edited by George Dodds and Robert Tavernor (2002); The Dancing Column: On Order in Architecture (1998); Leon Battista Alberti’s On the Art of Building in Ten Books translated by Joseph Rykwert, Neil Leach and Robert Tavernor (1991), The Idea of a Town: The Anthropology of Urban Form in Rome, Italy, and The Ancient World (1988) y On Adam’s House in Paradise The Idea of the Primitive Hut in Architectural History (1981).
In 2000, he received the Bruno Zevi Prize for the history of architecture at the Venice Biennale and, in 2009, the Gold Medal of the Fine Arts of Madrid. He was president of the International Council of Architectural Critics (CICA) since 1996 and was awarded the Royal Gold Medal in 2014. He was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2014 Birthday Honours for services to architecture. In May 2016, he received an honorary degree in pedagogy from the University of Bologna.
