Witold Rybczynski

Witold Rybczynski (born 1 March 1943) is a Canadian American architect, professor and writer. He is the Martin and Margy Meyerson Professor Emeritus of Urbanism at the University of Pennsylvania.<ref name="University of Penssylvania">Template:Cite web</ref>

Early life

Rybczynski was born in Edinburgh of Polish parentage and raised in Surrey, England, before moving at a young age to Canada. He attended Loyola College in Montreal. He received Bachelor of Architecture (1966) and Master of Architecture (1972) degrees from McGill University in Montreal.<ref name="University of Penssylvania"/><ref name="Brown NYT">Template:Cite web</ref>

Career

Rybczynski has written around 300 articles and papers on the subjects of housing, architecture, and technology, many of which are aimed at a non-technical readership. His work has been published in a wide variety of magazines, including The Wilson Quarterly, The Atlantic Monthly, and The New Yorker.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> From 2004 to 2010, he was architecture critic for Slate.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

He taught at McGill University (1974–1993) and the University of Pennsylvania (1993–2012), and served on the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts from 2004 to 2012.<ref>Thomas E. Luebke, ed., Civic Art: A Centennial History of the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, 2013): Appendix B, p. 554.</ref> He now lives in Philadelphia and is Emeritus Professor of Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania. He was married to Shirley Hallam, who died in 2021.<ref>"Portrait of a Marriage in Six Homes, The American Scholar, Winter 2021. </ref>

Awards and honors

Rybczynski's book Home: A Short History of an Idea was nominated for the 1986 Governor General's Award for non-fiction, and A Clearing in the Distance: Frederick Law Olmsted and North America in the Nineteenth Century won the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize and was short-listed for the Charles Taylor Prize in 2000.<ref name=Lukas>Template:Cite web</ref><ref name="McGill">Template:Cite web</ref><ref name="Literary Review of Canada">Template:Cite web</ref>

In 2007 Rybczynski was the recipient of the Seaside Prize and the Vincent Scully Prize, awarded by the National Building Museum.<ref name="University of Penssylvania"/> Rybczynski is a Senior Fellow of the Design Futures Council.<ref>"Design Futures Council Senior Fellows" Template:Webarchive</ref> In 2014 he received a National Design Award for Design Mind from the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum.<ref name="Smithsonian">Template:Cite web</ref>

Rybczynski is an honorary fellow of the American Institute of Architects, and an honorary member of the American Society of Landscape Architects.<ref name="University of Penssylvania"/> He has received the AIA Collaborative Honors, and the Pennsylvania AIA President's Award.<ref name="FMLink">Template:Cite web</ref><ref name="AIA">Template:Cite web</ref> He holds honorary doctorates from McGill University and the University of Western Ontario.<ref name="University of Penssylvania"/>

Works

• Paper Heroes: Appropriate Technology: Panacea or Pipe Dream? (1980)
• Taming the Tiger: The Struggle to Control Technology (1983)
• Home: A Short History of an Idea (1986)
• The Most Beautiful House in the World (1989)
• Waiting for the Weekend (1991)
• McGill: A Celebration (1991)
• Looking Around: A Journey Through Architecture (1992)
• A Place for Art/Un lieu pour l'art: The Architecture of the National Gallery of Canada (1993)
• City Life: Urban Expectations in a New World (1995)
• A Clearing in the Distance: Frederick Law Olmsted and North America in the Nineteenth Century (1999)
• One Good Turn: A Natural History of the Screwdriver and the Screw (2000)
• The Look of Architecture (2001)
• The Perfect House: A Journey with Renaissance Master Andrea Palladio (2002)
• Vizcaya: An American Villa and Its Makers (2006), co-written with Laurie Olin
• Last Harvest: How A Cornfield Became New Daleville: Real Estate Development in America (2007)
• My Two Polish Grandfathers: And Other Essays on the Imaginative Life (2009)
• Makeshift Metropolis: Ideas About Cities (2010)
• The Biography of a Building: How Robert Sainsbury and Norman Foster Built a Great Museum (2011)
• How Architecture Works: A Humanist's Toolkit (2013)
• Mysteries of the Mall: And Other Essays (2015)
• Now I Sit Me Down: From Klismos to Plastic Chair: A Natural History (2016) Template:ISBN<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
• Charleston Fancy: Little Houses and Big Dreams in the Holy City (2019)
• The Story of Architecture (2022)
• The Driving Machine: A Design History of the Car (2024)

See also

• Natalia Rybczynski

References

Notes Template:Reflist

External links

• Template:Official website
• Author page at Penguin Canada
• Faculty page at University of Pennsylvania Template:Webarchive
• Author page at Simon & Schuster
• Template:C-SPAN