Born in Warsaw in 1926, Rykwert was drawn to architecture while watching the construction of his family’s home, designed by architect Lucjan Korngold. “When the house was being built, I climbed the scaffolding, saw the architect’s drawings, and watched bricklayers working according to those drawings,” Rykwert said. “It made a strong impression on me, that somebody would draw and then a bricklayer would lay bricks according to this drawing.”

After the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939, Rykwert and his family fled to London. He attended the Bartlett School of Architecture before leaving for the Architectural Association, then worked briefly in the office of Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew, mainly contributing to school and hospital projects in Africa. His draftsmanship impressed Le Corbusier, who offered him a position—unpaid—that Rykwert ultimately declined.

But the famed Modernist still impacted Rykwert’s career. After Le Corbusier and Clive Entwistle’s 1946 proposal for a new Crystal Palace in 1946 failed to win a competition, Rykwert published a defense of the plan, attracting Entwistle’s attention and leading to the meeting with Corbusier. It also got Rykwert started as a writer.

In 1949, he traveled through Italy with architect John Turner intending to write a history of modern Italian architecture. The project was never completed, but he met numerous architects, including Gio Ponti, who was then running Domus. Rykwert soon became the magazine’s London correspondent. A few years later, he returned to the country to collaborate on an alternative history of Italian city types with sociologist Carlo Doglio. Rykwert would cover the Roman city; Doglio would handle the smaller comune. Rykwert delivered his chapter, but Doglio never completed his. Rather than stick the work in a drawer, Rykwert connected with another architect friend, Aldo van Eyck, then running the Dutch magazine Forum, who dedicated a special issue to the chapter. It was favorably received, and he eventually developed it into the seminal The Idea of a Town: The Anthropology of Urban Form, published in 1963.

Over the decades, Rykwert wrote a number of similarly consequential books that interrogated the origins of architectural ideas and contemporary planning concerns: On Adam's House in Paradise: The Idea of the Primitive Hut in Architectural History (1972), The First Moderns: The Architects of the Eighteenth Century (1980), The Dancing Column: On Order in Architecture (1966), and The Seduction of Place: The History and Future of Cities (2000).

“Joseph Rykwert is a gloriously erudite, ingeniously speculative historian and critic of architecture—of, that is, the forms (in the most concrete sense) of civilization, of social embodiment itself,” wrote critic Susan Sontag about The Dancing Column.

The success of The Idea of a Town also led Rykwert to academia, teaching architecture history and theory at University of Essex, Cambridge, and the University of Pennsylvania, where he served as Paul Philippe Cret professor of architecture at the Stuart Weitzman School of Design for a decade before becoming an emeritus professor. He was also a visiting lecturer at a raft of institutions, ranging from Princeton and Harvard to the University of Sydney and Paris’ Institut d'Urbanisme.

In 2014, Rykwert was honored for his contributions to architecture, first, by RIBA when it awarded him its Gold Medal—his nomination was supported by past winners David Chipperfield, Frank Gehry, and Renzo Piano—then again when he was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire.

“Architecture needs people who stand apart and interrogate it. Not necessarily as critics of buildings … but as thinkers who in turn shape the way we think about things,” wrote Hugh Pearman in 2013 for RIBA Journal. “With Rykwert, it is never about the purely functional, the picturesque or stylisms: his appreciation of the value of the human and the symbolic is one of his great contributions to architectural discourse.”

Rykwert said at the time he was “elated and enormously grateful” about the honors. But while he spent a lifetime engaged with the academic, his enduring interest was in the practical and lived experience of architecture and the built environment.

“A building is never standing on its own. It's always part of the fabric, whether it's in the country or in the town,” he said. “I think cities are to live in, not to look at.”