Joseph Rykwert, 98, Dies; Historian of Architecture Challenged Modernism.insisting that healthy communities grew out of deeply felt traditions and values

 Joseph Rykwert, 98, Dies; Historian of Architecture Challenged Modernism.insisting that healthy communities grew out of deeply felt traditions and values

Joseph Rykwert, 98, Dies; Historian of Architecture Challenged Modernism

A “gloriously erudite” critic, he denounced the embrace of blandly functional architecture in efforts to rebuild after World War II.

insisting that healthy communities grew out of deeply felt traditions and values

Much of his scholarship revolved around the way the past, especially Greco-Roman architecture, filtered down into later eras, and he praised architects who he felt tapped into that heritage — among them, Frank Lloyd Wright, Alvar Aalto and Louis Kahn — even if they identified as Modernists.

Dr. Rykwert was as much a literary critic and sociologist as he was a historian, and he often drew on literary ideas to make his points. All architecture is metaphor, he liked to say: The Greeks, for example, saw columns as analogous to the human body, a concept he examined in one of his best-known books, “The Dancing Column” (1996).

The same year, he moved to the newly founded University of Essex, where he created England’s first graduate-level program in architectural theory and history, subjects that had previously been wrapped into art history.

Joseph Rykwert CBE
Rykwert in 2013
Born	5 April 1926 Warsaw, Poland
Died	18 October 2024 (aged 98) London, England
Citizenship	United Kingdom
Alma mater	Bartlett School of Architecture Royal College of Art
Occupation	Architectural historian
Spouses	Jane Morton   ​ (divorced)​ Anne Engel ​ ​ (m. 1972; died 2015)​
Children	1

Publications (selection)

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• The Golden House (1947)
• The Ten Books of Architecture, by L.B. Alberti (annotated edn of Leoni's translation of 1756 (1955)
• Church Building (1966)
• 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 Rome, Italy, and The Ancient World (first edition, 1963)
• The First Moderns: The Architects of the Eighteenth Century (1980)
• The Necessity of Artifice (1982)
• The Brothers Adam (with Anne Rykwert, 1985)
• Leon Battista Alberti's On the Art of Building in Ten Books translated by Joseph Rykwert, Robert Tavernor and Neil Leach (1991)
• The Dancing Column: On Order in Architecture (1996)
• The Seduction of Place: The History and Future of Cities (2000)
• Body and Building: Essays on the Changing Relation of Body and Architecture edited by George Dodds and Robert Tavernor (2002)
• Structure and Meaning in Human Settlements (Editor, with Tony Atkin, 2005)
• The Judicious Eye: Architecture Against the Other Arts (2008)