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.

Joseph Rykwert, an architectural historian who challenged Modernism’s blank-slate approach to architecture and urban design, insisting that healthy communities grew out of deeply felt traditions and values — a position that helped fuel later efforts to make cities more livable and humane — died on Oct. 7 at his home in London. He was 98.

His stepdaughter, Marina Engel, confirmed the death.

Like the critic Lewis Mumford and the writer Jane Jacobs, Dr. Rykwert criticized the embrace of blandly functional architecture in the middle of the 20th century.

During the rush to rebuild European cities after World War II, architects and planners inspired by Modernist ideas frequently ignored the way their communities had been shaped by centuries of received wisdom and individual decisions. What had made those cities special, Dr. Rykwert asserted, was not their efficiency but their reflection of shared values.

“To consider the town or city a symbolic pattern, as the ancients did, seems utterly alien and pointless,” he wrote in “The Idea of a Town: The Anthropology of Urban Form in Rome, Italy and the Ancient World” (1964).

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.

Although Dr. Rykwert spent most of his career in academia, his work reached beyond design schools to influence practicing architects and general readers. He was also one of only four writers to receive the Gold Medal from the Royal Institute of British Architects, one of the architecture world’s highest honors. And in 2014, he was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire, for service to the field of architecture.

Among his fans were architects like Frank Gehry and Daniel Libeskind, as well as writers like Umberto Eco and Susan Sontag, who called him “a gloriously erudite, ingeniously speculative historian.”

For that reason — and because of his professorships at some of the top design schools — “he was immensely influential as a teacher of scholars, historians and theorists, but also of practicing architects,” said David Leatherbarrow, an architectural historian who studied with him at Cambridge and later taught with him at the University of Pennsylvania.

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).

“If you ask a child to draw you a house, the odds are you will get a face,” he wrote in The Architectural Review in 2015. “The door for a nose, two windows for eyes on either side of it and a roof — with or without a smoky chimney — for a headpiece.”

Joseph Rykwert was born on April 5, 1926, in Warsaw, the son of Elizabeth (Melup) Rykwert and Szymon Rykwert. His father, a railway engineer, looked down on architecture, which he considered a lesser pursuit. But Joseph was taken with his future career while watching the construction of his family home outside Warsaw in the late 1930s.

“I climbed the scaffolding, saw the architectural drawings and watched the bricklayers working according to those plans,” he said in a 2020 interview with the Polish Cultural Institute in London. “It made a strong impression on me.”

By early 1939, the family had become convinced that a German invasion of Poland was imminent. They fled through the Baltics to Sweden, and then to London.

Joseph began his architectural training at University College London, but soon transferred to the renowned Architectural Association, from which he graduated in 1947.

He intended to become a practicing architect. He wanted to work for Ernö Goldfinger, a leading British Modernist, but the pay was too low; Le Corbusier offered him a position in Paris, but no salary. Instead, he spent several years working for the prominent Modernists Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew.

Around the same time, he began to write. During a research trip to Italy, he met the architect Gio Ponti, who hired him as the London correspondent for the journal Domus, which Mr. Ponti edited.

Gradually, he shifted from practicing architecture to studying it. Another trip to Italy, to research the history of the country’s towns and cities, resulted in his first major book, “The Idea of a Town.”

By then, he was teaching, as well — first at Ulm University, in Germany, and then at the Royal College of Art, where he received a doctorate in 1967.

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.

Dr. Rykwert taught at Cambridge from 1980 to 1988, when he moved to the University of Pennsylvania. He took emeritus status in 1998.

His first marriage, to Jane Morton, ended in divorce. He married Anne Engel in 1972; she died in 2015. Along with his stepdaughter, he is survived by a son, Sebastian Rykwert, and two step-grandchildren.

Very few buildings from his early career as an architect remain. In 2007, his only surviving building in Britain, an unassuming Modernist apartment house in London, faced demolition to make way for a much larger project by Norman Foster.

As soon as preservation groups learned of Dr. Rykwert’s connection to it, they leaped to its defense, and the case became a cause célèbre in London architectural circles.

A year later, Mr. Foster backed down, and agreed to convert the building into a school for children with special needs, leaving Dr. Rykwert’s thoughtful design intact.