The family’s misfortunes did not end with their safe arrival in Britain. Rykwert senior was betrayed by business partners, resulting in economic jeopardy. Worse, he died of a heart attack at the young age of 48. Still, before his death, he secured entry for Joseph to attend Charterhouse, a distinguished British boarding school. There, the young Rykwert was exposed to innovative architectural scholarship in the person of the soon-to-be-eminent historian Rudolf Wittkower.

Rykwert began his architectural education at the Bartlett School at University College, London, but subsequently decided that the Architectural Association was a more intellectually appealing cultural milieu. Even more important was his immersion in a worldly intelligentsia, largely at the Student Movement House, where he met Elias Canetti, later to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, as well as the psychoanalyst Franz Elkisch. Before he had even concluded his professional education, Rykwert’s distinctive intellectual formation blended interests in myth, symbolism, and anthropology.

Upon graduation, he worked in conventionally modern architectural practices in London but, drawn to contemporary Italian architecture for its elan and its provocative responsiveness to history, Rykwert headed south. There, his luck continued as he befriended Vittorio Gregotti, Roberto Colasso—eventually to become the Italian publisher of his books—and Gio Ponti, who made him the London correspondent for his magazine Domus, where he launched the rediscovery of the forgotten Anglo-Irish designer Eileen Gray and mounted an early skeptical critique of Aldo Rossi’s ideas.

Rykwert’s activities led to an invitation to the newly founded Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm, Germany. There he met another dissident from the school’s hyper-rationalism, Hanno Kesting, who introduced him to phenomenological philosophy. Upon his return to London, he discovered that his Ulm sojourn had made him a desirable prospective academic, resulting in his appointment as Librarian at the Royal College of Art. More or less concurrent with this was the publication—in a Dutch magazine edited by another new friend, Aldo van Eyck—of his Idea of a Town.

With that commenced Rykwert’s half-century-long publishing career. The nonagenarian has now given us a Holocaust escape thriller and an architectural/intellectual bildungsroman in one. It is quite a tale, though it covers only the first four decades of his life. Will there be a volume two? On this point, Rykwert so far remains silent.