A message from Franca Trubiano, Associate Professor of Architecture and Graduate Group Chair:
With much sadness we share the news of the passing of our brilliant colleague, Joseph Rykwert on Friday October 18, 2024. A consummate scholar, quick wit, and gentle soul, Joseph was the PhD Graduate Group Chair, the Paul Phillipe Cret Professor at PENN (1988-1998), an RIBA Gold Medal Winner (2013), and an inductee of the Chevalier de l’ordre des Arts et des Lettres (1984). He will always be the jovial writer with an office in the Furness (Fisher Fine Arts Building), who started his seminars on Vitruvius in the Holmes Perkins Rare Book Room with a twinkle in his eye, a trench coat on his shoulders, and a bag full of Perugina Baci. Amongst the books that we’ve read and re-read authored by Prof. Rykwert, On Adam's House in Paradise: The Idea of the Primitive Hut in Architectural History (Museum of Modern Art, first edition, 1972), The Idea of a Town: The Anthropology of Urban Form in Rome, Italy, and The Ancient World (1963), The First Moderns: The Architects of the Eighteenth Century (1980), The Necessity of Artifice (1982), The Brothers Adam (with Anne Rykwert, 1985), Leon Battista Alberti's On the Art of Building in Ten Books translated by Joseph Rykwert, Robert Tavernor and Neil Leach (1991), The Dancing Column: On Order in Architecture (1996), The Seduction of Place: The History and Future of Cities (2000), The Judicious Eye: Architecture Against the Other Arts (2008). He left an indelible mark on the Ph.D. Program in Architecture and the larger PENN community. We celebrate him and his life in Architecture.
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