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 ancestors 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 First World War, and made a lot of money in the 1920s, but, as Rykwert describes in the opening passages of his autobiography Remembering Places (2017), Szymon lost it all in the stock market crash of 1929.
This upbringing gave Rykwert a distinctive sense of savoir-faire. At home, he spoke German, Polish and Hebrew, he understood Russian, learnt French at school as a child and, aged eight or nine, was sent to Whittingehame College in Brighton to learn English. In 1939, he returned to Whittingehame, but only for two terms, insisting on spending the summer holidays with his family in Warsaw. Soon after arriving in Poland, they fled the country—as the Germans invaded, marking the outbreak of the Second World War—managing, but only just, to cross the frontier in a taxi to Lithuania and from there to Stockholm.
On arriving in London, his parents moved to a flat in Eyre Court on Finchley Road and, after passing common entrance, Rykwert went to University College School. But his father had a stroke, had to abandon his business and they moved to a small hotel in Belsize Park, north London, then to Llandudno, north Wales, ending up in north Oxford, where his father died, aged 48. In the meantime Rykwert’s parents had somehow afforded for him to go to Charterhouse school in Surrey. He was not an obvious public schoolboy, but his headmaster, Robert Birley, organised talks there by Rudolf Wittkower on “England and the Classical Tradition”, which helped inspire Rykwert’s lifelong interest in the literature of classicism.
Aged only 16, Rykwert left Charterhouse to study at the Bartlett School of Architecture, then based in Cambridge, where he spent two years drawing the classical orders under A.E. Richardson, acquiring a taste for antiquarian books from David’s bookstall in Cambridge market. Not liking the conservatism of the Bartlett, he moved to the Architectural Association (AA) in London, as recommended by Lucjan Korngold, architect in 1935-36 of Rykwert’s parents’ villa in Otwock, southeast Warsaw. At the AA, Rykwert imbibed a belief in the potential virtues of post-war reconstruction, but also developed a less common interest in anthropology and symbolism, encouraged by discovering a copy of W.R. Lethaby’s Architecture, Mysticism and Myth (1892) in the AA’s library.
After a year out working for the architects Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew, Rykwert joined the practice of Richard Sheppard. This did not last long and he got a job, first as an assistant on Chambers’s Encyclopedia, and then working for the structural engineer Ove Arup.
International adventures
In 1949, Rykwert and John Turner, a friend from the AA, travelled to Italy to write a history of modern Italian architecture. They attended the meeting of the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM) held in Bergamo, where Rykwert met the historian and critic Sigfried Giedion, the architect Le Corbusier and leading Italian architects, including Ernesto Rogers and Gio Ponti, who employed him to write for the Italian magazine Domus. He found Italian architects much more interested in the interrelationship between architecture, history and ideas than their more conservative British counterparts.
Sometime in the early 1950s, Rykwert took classes at the Courtauld Institute in London, but he never liked the Courtauld model of connoisseurship, a dislike that was reciprocated, particularly by Anthony Blunt. He gravitated more naturally to the Warburg Institute, then still housed in South Kensington, where he attended classes by Wittkower and made friends with Wittkower’s student Colin Rowe. In 1954, he got a job teaching part-time at the Hammersmith School of Arts and Crafts. In the same year, he published an article on the work of Giedion in the Burlington Magazine,which demonstrates his early interest in historiography. In 1955, he published an annotated version of Alberti’s Ten Books on Architecture for the art book publisher Alec Tiranti.
After meeting the painter and designer Tomás Maldonado, Rykwert took a teaching position at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm, Germany, where Maldonado was rector. He hated it. He wrote an essay, “The Sitting Position: A Question of Method”, which marked the beginning of his interest in the relationship between buildings and the human body.
In 1961, he was offered a post as librarian and tutor at the Royal College of Art in London. This suited him well. He established a slide library and set up an architectural office that designed a bookshop and a fur-lined nightclub called Wips for Timothy Willoughby de Eresby. He also taught a course on the psychology of clothes in the fashion department, where his students included Ossie Clark and Zandra Rhodes.
Rykwert’s first major publication, The Idea of a Town, appeared in 1963. Originally published as a special issue of the Dutch magazine Forum, it was a deeply scholarly exploration of the ancient literature on cities, intended to demonstrate the extent to which they had a symbolic role in classical culture.
In 1967, Rykwert was invited by Noel Annan to set up a department of art in the newly established University of Essex. He did this on condition that he was allowed to devise a master’s programme on the history and theory of architecture, which he taught jointly with the Czech philosophical historian Dalibor Vesely. It attracted brilliant students, including Alberto Pérez-Gómez and Libeskind; but neither the university authorities nor RIBA appreciated his highly intellectual approach and he ended up teaching the course in London, in Hugh Casson’s office at the Royal Academy of Arts and the basement of Sir John Soane’s Museum.
From Essex to Cambridge
Rykwert made some excellent early appointments at Essex, including T.J. Clark and Dawn Adès, and contributed to the idea that all students should study the Enlightenment in their first year; but, by 1969, it was evident that administration was not his forte. Michael Podro, a fellow Warburgian, was hired to chair the department while Rykwert went on sabbatical to the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in New York. In theory, they should have got on well: both Warburgians, intellectual historians, of Polish origin. In practice, they did not and the department split into factions. In 1979, Rykwert migrated, at Colin St John Wilson’s invitation, to the architecture department at Cambridge, taking Vesely and their master’s course with him.
Rykwert’s 1972 book, On Adam’s House in Paradise, published by New York’s Museum of Modern Art and dedicated to Roberto Calasso, attracted some of the same criticism as his teaching. In particular, Ernst Gombrich, then at the height of his authority as director of the Warburg Institute, wrote an excoriating review in The New York Review of Books and neither Kenneth Frampton nor Reyner Banham were much more sympathetic. The book was an essay about the interest in the primitive hut across cultures, not intended as a conventional monograph.
Rykwert’s chef-d’oeuvre was The First Moderns, published by MIT Press in 1980, another extraordinarily learned and dense exploration of theoretical and speculative writings about architecture, beginning with Claude Perrault’s Ordonnance des cinq espèces de colonnes selon la méthode de l’antique and ending with the work of Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand.
At Cambridge, as at Essex, Rykwert and Vesely attracted pupils wanting to explore new approaches to architecture. These included Robert Tavernor and Neil Leach, with whom Rykwert worked on a new edition of Alberti’s On the Art of Building in Ten Books, published in 1991. He also worked with Tavernor on an exhibition on Alberti held at the Palazzo del Te in Mantua in 1994.
In 1988, Rykwert was appointed to the professorship at the University of Pennsylvania, recognition of the esteem in which he was held by the international architectural community. He and his second wife, Anne, with whom he wrote a book on Robert Adam, moved first to Philadelphia and then to Canal Street, New York. Rykwert continued to publish widely and was increasingly fêted, receiving a festschrift in 2002, honorary fellowship of the Royal Academy in 2011 and a CBE in 2014.
Joseph Rykwert; born Warsaw 5 April 1926; married 1960 Jane Morton (one son; marriage dissolved); 1972 Anne-Marie Sandersley (died 2015; one step-daughter); died London 17 October 2024
