Joseph rykwert biography

  • Joseph Rykwert CBE (5 April 1926 – 17 or 18 October 2024) was a.
  • Joseph Rykwert CBE was a British architectural historian and writer.
  • Joseph Rykwert was Paul Philippe Cret Professor Emeritus of Architecture and one of the foremost architectural historians and critics of his generation.

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    Remembering Joseph Rykwert, influential writer and teacher on the theory of architecture

    Joseph Rykwert was a wide-ranging and intellectually adventurous writer on architecture, particularly its theory and historical texts. He was an influential teacher at Essex and Cambridge universities before succeeding Louis Kahn as Paul Philippe Cret Professor of Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania in 1988. His books include The Idea of a Town (1963), The First Moderns (1980) and The Seduction of Place (2000), which are particularly admired by architects—including Daniel Libeskind, David Chipperfield and Eric Parry—and led to the award of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) Royal Gold Medal in 2014.

    Rykwert was born in 1926 in Warsaw, the child of a prosperous middle-class Jewish family, one of whose förfäder had been expelled from Spain in the 15th century. His father, Szymon Rykwert, came from a family of ten, trained as an engineer in Manchester before the Fi

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    Joseph Rykwert (1926 - 2024)

    BIOGRAPHY

    • M.A., Cantab. Dr., Royal College of Art
    • Hon. Dsc. Edinburgh, Hon. Dr Cordoba

    Joseph Rykwert was Paul Philippe Cret Professor Emeritus of Architecture and one of the foremost architectural historians and critics of his generation. Rykwert was the author of many influential works on architecture, including The Idea of a Town (1963), On Adam’s House in Paradise (1972), The Dancing Column (1996) and The Seduction of Place (2000). All his books have been translated into several languages.

    Joseph Rykwert was the 2014 recipient of the Royal Institute of British Architects Gold Medal.

    Publications (selection)

    The Ten Books of Architecture, by L.B. Alberti (annotated edn of Leoni’s translation of 1756 (1955)
    On Adam's House in Paradise: The Idea of the Primitive Hut in Architectural History (Museum of Modern Art, first edition, 1972)
    The Idea of a Town: The Anthropology of Urban Form in

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    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 1

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