On October 18, 2024, Jozef Rykwert, a Polish-British architectural critic and historian of Jewish descent, professor at the University of Pennsylvania, author of numerous studies and theoretical texts on architecture and urban planning, died at the age of 98.
Although Jozef Rykwert was born in Warsaw in 1926, he spent most of his life in Great Britain, where he left with his family shortly after the outbreak of World War II. He began his education at The Bartlett School of Architecture at University College London. He took his first steps in academia at the Hammersmith School of Arts & Crafts and the Ulm School of Design. Jozef Rykwert earned his doctorate at the Royal College of Art in 1967, and then went on to work at the University of Essex, where he and Dalibor Veseli gave a series of lectures titled "History and Theory of Architecture." In his lectures, Joseph Rykwert embedded the art of building not only in historical and artistic contexts, but also in light of issues in sociology and anthropology, giving architectural discourse a new direction, which is still dominant today.
In 1980 he joined the University of Cambridge, and in 1988 he moved to the United States, where he taught at the University of Pennsylvania, becoming a professor. He has received honorary doctorates from the universities of Edinburgh, Cordoba, Bath, Toronto, Rome and Trieste. Member of Academia di San Luca and the Polish Academy of Sciences. President of the International Council of Architecture Critics (CICA) since 1996. His students have included some of the most important figures in contemporary architecture, including Daniel Libeskind, Alberto Perez-Gomez, Eric Parry, George Baird and Alan Colquhoun.
His first influential academic work was a study titled "The Idea of the City. Anthropology of the City Form in Rome, Italy and the Ancient World." The text of the dissertation was first published in 1963 by Aldo van Eyck in the journal he ran, "Forum" Reaching out to the sources of modern thinking about architecture, Joseph Rykwert translated intoEnglish and provided commentary on Leone Battista Alberti's "Ten Books on the Art of Building" (1988), and later curated an exhibition presenting his work at the Palazzo del Te in Mantua (1994).
As architects, he held Apollodors of Damascus, Gianlorenzo Bernini and Francesco Borromini in high esteem. He sought the basis of modern thinking about building in the works of Rococo and early Neoclassical architects, which he wrote about in his work "At the Origins of Modernism. Architects of the 18th Century" (1980). With detective insight, he derived modern phenomena in urban planning and architecture from primordial ideas that throughout history shaped building models and dictated forms, as he proved in his publications "On Adam's House of Eden: The idea of the primordial hut in the history of architecture" (1972) and "The Temptation of Place: The Past and Future of Cities" (2000).
He is the recipient of many awards and decorations - the French Order of Arts and Letters (1984), the Bruno Zevi Award, which was presented to him at the 2000 Venice Architecture Biennale, or the Spanish Gold Medal Bellas Artes, awarded by the Spanish Minister of Culture and Sports. Commander of the Order of the British Empire. In 2013, honored with the award of The Royal Gold Medal RIBA, given by the Royal Institute of British Architects RIBA. Recipient of the Alfred Jerzykowski Foundation Award (1989), the Bene Merito Badge and the Gold Badge of the Polish Chamber of Architects (2022).
