ABSTRACT
This chapter presents autobiography of Joseph Rykwert. Rykwert is Paul Philippe Cret Professor Emeritus of Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, and one of the foremost architectural historians and critics of his generation. He has spent most of his working life in the UK and US. Born in Warsaw in 1926, Joseph Rykwert is one of the best-known critics and historians of architecture. He addresses the dualities between which he had to navigate: Jewish/Polish, Polish/British and later Practice/Scholarship. VE day provoked a frenzy of jubilation – processions, crowds, royals on the Buckingham Palace balcony, parades. And then followed the first salvo of that great Parisian cultural onslaught: the Picasso-Matisse Exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in November 1945, which must have been organized hard on the Allied arrival in Paris.
