Joseph Rykwert, born in 1926, is the author of Adam’s House in Paradise, The First Moderns, and The Dancing Column, books whose methodological originality and archival and anthropological depth won him the Gold Medal of the Royal Institute of British Architects in 2014, a rarity for a nonpractitioner. Rykwert has been known to have a dramatic personal history, but he usually declined to discuss it. With this memoir, he bows to requests and deploys his formidable memory—visual and otherwise—to recount his role in important developments in architectural culture during crucial years of the 20th century. The dramatic story begins in his childhood in the 1930s, within an upper-middle-class Jewish family in Warsaw, and concludes in the late 1960s in London with his first academic appointment and the publication of The Idea of a Town. In this text, which first brought him serious professional attention, he robustly reasserted the significance of ritual and myth in ancient city planning.
Rykwert’s childhood was evidently happy. But looming over his teenage years was growing anti-Semitism, with a threat that his successful engineer father failed to anticipate. The result was a panicked flight from Warsaw for his entire family in early September 1939—after the German invasion of Poland had already begun. Making use of business connections, Rykwert senior managed to get his immediate family to safety, albeit leaving almost all their possessions behind while rushing through Riga (Latvia), Stockholm, and Amsterdam, to London.
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