Architectural historian and Royal Gold Medallist, whose erudition, empathy and insight have influenced the history of ideas for three generations
The architectural historian Joseph Rykwert leaves a vast corpus of writings and teachings which has redefined the place of architecture in the history of ideas. His capacity to see beyond conventional historical narration, his omnivorous erudition and fundamental empathy were perhaps given impetus by his youthful experience of traumatic displacement. Born into a prosperous Jewish family in Warsaw in 1926, he escaped perilously to exile in 1939.
As a student at the Bartlett and AA he became associated with the Jewish diaspora gathered around the Warburg Institute, including his teacher Rudolph Wittkower. Rykwert embraced Catholicism; an early book, Church Building (1966), was published by the Vatican. It sought to explain Christian architecture not as an autonomous compendium of styles and forms, but as places shaped to house a mutable set of human rituals.
Postwar England was isolated from culture in Europe; Rykwert the exile reached out, becoming deeply connected to currents of modernism. He worked in Milan for Ernesto Rogers, befriended Gio Ponti, doorstepped Le Corbusier for a job, and championed the elderly and forgotten Eileen Gray. His own built work owed much to these connections: a swinging sixties London nightclub lined in Loosian fur, and a Chelsea housing complex drawing on Gray and Le Corbusier.
Rykwert was vigilant to the dangers of banalisation posed by the International Style and CIAM. A significant historical course-correction came in his book The Idea of a Town (1963), fed by his association with the Team X architect Aldo van Eyck. At a time when Western rationalist urbanism was primarily oriented to favour faster traffic and social segregation, it used archaeology and anthropology to describe the birth of Roman cities as a process anchored in intuition, ritual and spirituality, and became an inspiration for Italo Calvino’s book-reverie Invisible Cities.
Excavating the foundations of the modern more generally became the task of his own favourite book, the whopping The First Moderns (1980). Developed with his PhD students at Essex University, it challenges the smug view of early modernists that they were effecting a decisive break with the past. Rykwert posits that the schism in the history of ideas beginning in the 17th century was of far greater importance, detaching science from a previous harmony with the arts and religion.
Rykwert worked continuously with his second wife Anne Engel until her death in 2015, co-authoring a book about the brothers Adam. In the preface to The Dancing Column: On Order in Architecture (1996), he regretted that Engel declined recognition as an equal partner. If The First Moderns sought to refute a supposed fresh start in the 20th century, this vast enterprise attempted the even weightier task of reframing classicism not as a finite taxonomy of building components but as a protean and inconsistent process touching on the broadest aspects of culture.
Alberti was a figure of enduring interest: an architect engaged in many other fields including sport, poetry and philosophy. Rykwert found perhaps the closest contemporary parallel to a renaissance polymath in Ivan Illich, the priest and historian of ideas. The pair taught in parallel at the University of Pennsylvania in the early 1990s, developing a moral vision for architecture. Illich focused his teaching on Rykwert’s volume of essays The Necessity of Artifice (1982), which captures the fizzing range of his interests, from the meaning of seats to the ‘dark side’ of the Bauhaus, Semper and etymology.
Rykwert lived long enough to see his influence flourish through three generations, and his work reframed through contemporary preoccupations. His book On Adam’s House in Paradise (1972) perhaps resonates more strongly in the context of ecological crisis. Having recentred attention on the human through most of his work, here he introduces the question of non-human agency through the persistent paradigm of the first building. As Rykwert suggested at the celebrations for his RIBA Royal Gold Medal in 2014, it could be read differently now – beginnings implicating endings more poignantly in our time.
Andrew Todd is an architect and former student of Joseph Rykwert