1949-2021

After a long convalescence with a fatal ending due to coronavirus, on 27 February Richard Ingersoll passed away in Huebro, not far from Almería and the Mediterranean, which he loved so much. Ingersoll, historian, critic, and one of the most prolific and personal collaborators of Arquitectura Viva, was born to a distinguished family of San Francisco. He abandoned his architecture studies during the time of Vietnam War to carry an intellectual and bohemian life in Italy, before returning to Berkeley, where he earned his PhD with a thesis directed by his mentor, historian Spiro Kostof. Richard then went back to Italy and, after a few nomadic years, settled permanently in Florence, teaching at Syracuse University. There he wrote countless critical texts on architecture, in which combined intelligent analysis and elegant prose, and also tackled the monumental endeavor of World Architecture: A Cross-Cultural History, extending and entirely rewriting Kostof’s capolavoro A History of Architecture: Settings and Rituals in that environmental but culturally sophisticated key that Ingersoll turned into one of his marks as architectural thinker.