© Paweł Mazur
Joseph Rykwert died on 18 October at 98, breaking the thread that for a half-century has guided architects in the labyrinths of history. Born in Warsaw in 1926 and evacuated with his family to England at the outbreak of World War II, Joseph studied at Bartlett and the AA, and began his long academic career at the University of Essex in 1967, where for thirteen years he taught an architecture history and theory course that left a mark. From there he went to Cambridge and then to UPenn, and his American phase included stints at institutions like Princeton, Harvard, and The Cooper Union. Parallel to teaching, Rykwert was an original, prolific writer who influenced the architectural debate with books like On Adam’s House in Paradise (1972), The Idea of a Town (1976), and The First Moderns (1980), not to mention his sustained interest in Alberti, of whose De re aedificatoria he published critical editions (1955, 1989) and on whom he and his wife, Anne, curated an exhibition at Palazzo Te in Mantua (1994).
With an anthropological bent that led him toward Giedion and Van Eyck while setting him against Rossi, Tafuri, and the Tendenza, Rykwert opened our eyes to architectural treatises with On Adam’s House in Paradise, and in addressing the urban phenomenon he prioritized the symbolic over the functional in The Idea of a Town, a key work written in the 1960s which appeared in Spanish in 1985 with a foreword by Rafael Moneo. Editing that book gave me the chance to visit him in his London home, and in the years thereafter he contributed to both AV and Arquitectura Viva, in the latter with a theme so close to his concerns that in Italy, his true architectural homeland, La Repubblica has bidden him farewell under the title “Addio all’architetto della città ideale.”
Equally erudite and curious, Rykwert penned texts on contemporary architects like Richard Meier in simultaneity with essays that intermingled body and place, past and future, such as The Necessity of Artifice (1982), The Dancing Column (1996), The Seduction of Place (2000), Body and Building (2002), and his memoirs, Remembering Places (2017). He received the RIBA Gold Medal, a distinction usually given to practicing architects, in 2014, in the same edition that named me an International Fellow of the British institute. I took advantage of the trip to London to speak at a seminar held at the Victoria & Albert in honor of the historian, describing the complicated process of publishing The Idea of the Town and the no less complex task of producing the Spanish version. Both the original and the Spanish edition showed on the cover a Knossos coin with the Minotaur maze, and I could not resist the temptation to liken Rykwert’s book to Ariadne’s red thread: a guide to orient us in the unequal struggle with the mercantile monsters now threatening architecture.
