Joseph Rykwert, who has died aged 98, was a historian and critic of architecture of exceptional intellect, cultural breadth and distinctive outlook. His books and his teaching changed the understanding of his discipline and helped to move the design and planning of cities and buildings away from the functionalist mindset that dominated postwar building. In 2014 he was awarded Britain’s leading honour for architecture, the Royal Gold Medal, one of a very few times that it has been given to a writer rather than a practitioner.
Rykwert’s first book, The Idea of a Town (1963), by exploring the rituals that underlay the founding of ancient cities, sought to restore the importance of such things as memory, feeling, intuition and instinct in the making of the places where human beings live. It was an important part of a wider reaction to technocratic approaches that were causing widespread destruction in cities across the world. It is now commonplace for developers and planners to talk about “placemaking”, by which they mean the ways in which architecture and landscape work together to make social urban spaces, a concept that owes much to Rykwert’s belief that buildings should not be considered in isolation but as part of the fabric of a city.
His other books included On Adam’s House in Paradise (1972), on architects’ enduring fascination with the idea of a primitive hut at one with nature, and The First Moderns (1980) – his favourite – which revealed the roots of 20th-century ideas of modernity in thinkers and architects 200 years earlier.
In all his work Rykwert moved readily between architecture, philosophy, art and other disciplines, aided by his wide erudition and an impressive library that he started building as a student. He was motivated by his certainty that the design of buildings is always part of a wider culture, and by his passion for the places that make a city flourish, whether a remembered street in pre-war Poland or a forum in ancient Etruria. He was, as the writer Susan Sontag put it, an “ingeniously speculative historian and critic of architecture – of that is, the forms (in the most concrete sense) of civilisation.”
The many architects whom he inspired and influenced include the Stirling prize winners Sir David Chipperfield and Witherford Watson Mann, Eric Parry, Patrick Lynch, and Sir James Stirling (the giant of British architecture after whom the prize was named).
Rykwert’s demeanour was gentle and civilised – “the sort of great-uncle I would have liked to have”, as one former student, the artist Richard Wentworth, now puts it, who “always imparted a general sense of mischief”. This character was all the more remarkable for the traumas of his childhood, in which he and his family had to flee for their lives from the advancing German armies. Many of his relatives died in the Holocaust.
Joseph was born in Warsaw, the son of Elizabeth (nee Melup), and Szymon Rykwert. His father, a railways engineer, was ruined after the great crash of 1929, but worked his way back to prosperity. In September 1939, when the Wehrmacht invaded Poland, the Rykwerts escaped via Lithuania, Latvia and Sweden to Britain. Joseph went to Charterhouse, a “plunge” in his words “into the wholly alien world” of an English boarding school. His father died of a stroke early in Joseph’s time there, leaving his mother “skimping” to pay his fees. He went to the Bartlett School of Architecture, which was evacuated to Cambridge in wartime, then the Architectural Association in London.
He started to write, studiously, taking two years to complete his first book review for the Burlington Magazine. He wanted to work for “the London architect I most admired”, Ernö Goldfinger, but was put off by the measly pay on offer – 30 shillings a week – and went instead to the pioneer British modernists Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew, who paid five times as much. Rykwert later decided to refuse a job offer in the Paris studio of the most famous architect of the 20th century, Le Corbusier, who paid nothing. Eventually, although his built works included a fur-lined nightclub and a house in Chelsea, Rykwert’s writing and teaching would take over from designing buildings.
In both London and Paris, which he visited as a young man, the postwar years were for him a time of “exhilaration and easy familiarity” in which “people of great intellectual and professional distinction ... seemed prepared to accept an obscure and impoverished youth as a partner in dialogue.” From the age of 18 he exchanged ideas with the future Nobel prizewinner Elias Canetti. Later he became friends with Italo Calvino, whose 1972 novel Invisible Cities owed something to Rykwert’s urban thinking, and the painters Prunella Clough and Michael Ayrton. Iris Murdoch, Umberto Eco and Saul Steinberg were also acquaintances. In 1968 he would befriend the great modernist designer Eileen Gray, then living in obscurity at the age of 90, and rediscover her work in an article for the Italian magazine Domus.
He started to teach, including at Ulm School of Design, in Germany, then considered to be the heir of the Bauhaus as (in Rykwert’s words) “the forge of all that was new in design”, although he found its “systematic rationality” uncongenial. He was librarian and tutor at the Royal College of Art in London from 1961 to 1967 and from 1967 to 1980 professor of art at the new University of Essex.
His postgraduate seminars for the university, held in various locations including the Royal Academy in London with the historian and theorist Dalibor Veselý, were groundbreaking for the way they combined architecture with philosophy and anthropology.
After Essex, Rykwert held posts and professorships at the University of Cambridge and, from 1988 to 1998, at the University of Pennsylvania, and visiting appointments in numerous universities in several countries. In his retirement he continued to welcome lively and creative minds to his book-lined London flat. He was appointed CBE in 2014.
His first marriage, to Jane Morton, ended in divorce. In 1972 he married Anne Engel, his editor on The First Moderns, with whom he enjoyed a successful partnership until her death in 2015. He is survived by Sebastian, his son with Jane, and by Anne’s daughter from a previous marriage, Marina, and by two step-granddaughters.
• Joseph Rykwert, architectural historian and critic, born 5 April 1926; died 18 October 2024
