Joseph Rykwert was a wide-ranging and intellectually adventurous author on structure, significantly its idea and historic texts. He was an influential instructor at Essex and Cambridge universities earlier than succeeding Louis Kahn as Paul Philippe Cret Professor of Structure on the College of Pennsylvania in 1988. His books embody The Concept of a City (1963), The First Moderns (1980) and The Seduction of Place (2000), that are significantly admired by architects—together with 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 kid of a affluent middle-class Jewish household, one among whose ancestors had been expelled from Spain within the fifteenth century. His father, Szymon Rykwert, got here from a household of ten, skilled as an engineer in Manchester earlier than the First World Warfare, and made some huge cash within the Twenties, however, as Rykwert describes within the opening passages of his autobiography Remembering Locations (2017), Szymon misplaced all of it within the inventory market crash of 1929.
This upbringing gave Rykwert a particular sense of savoir-faire. At house, he spoke German, Polish and Hebrew, he understood Russian, learnt French at college as a baby and, aged eight or 9, was despatched to Whittingehame School in Brighton to be taught English. In 1939, he returned to Whittingehame, however just for two phrases, insisting on spending the summer season holidays along with his household in Warsaw. Quickly after arriving in Poland, they fled the nation—because the Germans invaded, marking the outbreak of the Second World Warfare—managing, however solely simply, to cross the frontier in a taxi to Lithuania and from there to Stockholm.
On arriving in London, his mother and father moved to a flat in Eyre Courtroom on Finchley Highway and, after passing frequent entrance, Rykwert went to College School Faculty. However his father had a stroke, needed to abandon his enterprise they usually moved to a small resort in Belsize Park, north London, then to Llandudno, north Wales, ending up in north Oxford, the place his father died, aged 48. Within the meantime Rykwert’s mother and father had someway afforded for him to go to Charterhouse faculty in Surrey. He was not an apparent public schoolboy, however his headmaster, Robert Birley, organised talks there by Rudolf Wittkower on “England and the Classical Custom”, which helped encourage Rykwert’s lifelong curiosity within the literature of classicism.
Aged solely 16, Rykwert left Charterhouse to review on the Bartlett Faculty of Structure, then based mostly in Cambridge, the place he spent two years drawing the classical orders below A.E. Richardson, buying a style for antiquarian books from David’s bookstall in Cambridge market. Not liking the conservatism of the Bartlett, he moved to the Architectural Affiliation (AA) in London, as advisable by Lucjan Korngold, architect in 1935-36 of Rykwert’s mother and father’ villa in Otwock, southeast Warsaw. On the AA, Rykwert imbibed a perception within the potential virtues of post-war reconstruction, but in addition developed a much less frequent curiosity in anthropology and symbolism, inspired by discovering a replica of W.R. Lethaby’s Structure, Mysticism and Fantasy (1892) within the AA’s library.
After a 12 months out working for the architects Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew, Rykwert joined the apply of Richard Sheppard. This didn’t final lengthy and he bought a job, first as an assistant on Chambers’s Encyclopedia, after which working for the structural engineer Ove Arup.
Worldwide adventures
In 1949, Rykwert and John Turner, a good friend from the AA, travelled to Italy to write down a historical past of contemporary Italian structure. They attended the assembly of the Congrès Internationaux d’Structure Moderne (CIAM) held in Bergamo, the place Rykwert met the historian and critic Sigfried Giedion, the architect Le Corbusier and main Italian architects, together with Ernesto Rogers and Gio Ponti, who employed him to write down for the Italian journal Domus. He discovered Italian architects rather more within the interrelationship between structure, historical past and concepts than their extra conservative British counterparts.
Someday within the early Fifties, Rykwert took courses on the Courtauld Institute in London, however he by no means favored the Courtauld mannequin of connoisseurship, a dislike that was reciprocated, significantly by Anthony Blunt. He gravitated extra naturally to the Warburg Institute, then nonetheless housed in South Kensington, the place he attended courses by Wittkower and made associates with Wittkower’s scholar Colin Rowe. In 1954, he bought a job instructing part-time on the Hammersmith Faculty of Arts and Crafts. In the identical 12 months, he printed an article on the work of Giedion within the Burlington Journal,which demonstrates his early curiosity in historiography. In 1955, he printed an annotated model of Alberti’s Ten Books on Structure for the artwork e book writer Alec Tiranti.
After assembly the painter and designer Tomás Maldonado, Rykwert took a instructing place on the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm, Germany, the place Maldonado was rector. He hated it. He wrote an essay, “The Sitting Place: A Query of Methodology”, which marked the start of his curiosity within the relationship between buildings and the human physique.
In 1961, he was supplied a put up as librarian and tutor on the Royal School of Artwork in London. This suited him effectively. He established a slide library and arrange an architectural workplace that designed a bookshop and a fur-lined nightclub referred to as Wips for Timothy Willoughby de Eresby. He additionally taught a course on the psychology of garments within the style division, the place his college students included Ossie Clark and Zandra Rhodes.
Rykwert’s first main publication, The Concept of a City, appeared in 1963. Initially printed as a particular situation of the Dutch journal Discussion board, it was a deeply scholarly exploration of the traditional literature on cities, supposed to show the extent to which that they had a symbolic position in classical tradition.
In 1967, Rykwert was invited by Noel Annan to arrange a division of artwork within the newly established College of Essex. He did this given that he was allowed to plot a grasp’s programme on the historical past and idea of structure, which he taught collectively with the Czech philosophical historian Dalibor Vesely. It attracted good college students, together with Alberto Pérez-Gómez and Libeskind; however neither the college authorities nor RIBA appreciated his extremely mental method and he ended up instructing the course in London, in Hugh Casson’s workplace on the Royal Academy of Arts and the basement of Sir John Soane’s Museum.
From Essex to Cambridge
Rykwert made some wonderful early appointments at Essex, together with T.J. Clark and Daybreak Adès, and contributed to the concept that all college students ought to examine the Enlightenment of their first 12 months; however, by 1969, it was evident that administration was not his forte. Michael Podro, a fellow Warburgian, was employed to chair the division whereas Rykwert went on sabbatical to the Institute for Structure and City Research in New York. In idea, they need to have gotten on effectively: each Warburgians, mental historians, of Polish origin. In apply, they didn’t and the division break up into factions. In 1979, Rykwert migrated, at Colin St John Wilson’s invitation, to the structure division at Cambridge, taking Vesely and their grasp’s course with him.
Rykwert’s 1972 e book, On Adam’s Home in Paradise, printed by New York’s Museum of Fashionable Artwork and devoted to Roberto Calasso, attracted among the identical criticism as his instructing. Specifically, Ernst Gombrich, then on the top of his authority as director of the Warburg Institute, wrote an excoriating evaluation in The New York Overview of Books and neither Kenneth Frampton nor Reyner Banham have been rather more sympathetic. The e book was an essay concerning the curiosity within the primitive hut throughout cultures, not supposed as a standard monograph.
Rykwert’s chef-d’oeuvre was The First Moderns, printed by MIT Press in 1980, one other terribly realized and dense exploration of theoretical and speculative writings about structure, starting with Claude Perrault’s Ordonnance des cinq espèces de colonnes selon la méthode de l’vintage and ending with the work of Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand.
At Cambridge, as at Essex, Rykwert and Vesely attracted pupils eager to discover new approaches to structure. These included Robert Tavernor and Neil Leach, with whom Rykwert labored on a brand new version of Alberti’s On the Artwork of Constructing in Ten Books, printed in 1991. He additionally labored with Tavernor on an exhibition on Alberti held on the Palazzo del Te in Mantua in 1994.
In 1988, Rykwert was appointed to the professorship on the College of Pennsylvania, recognition of the esteem by which he was held by the worldwide architectural group. He and his second spouse, Anne, with whom he wrote a e book on Robert Adam, moved first to Philadelphia after which to Canal Avenue, New York. Rykwert continued to publish extensively and was more and more 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
