ABSTRACT
Joseph Rykwert CBE 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. The school to which his father relegated him offered the plunge into a wholly alien world. It was his first and only English boarding school. Whittinghame may also have been boarding - but it only aspired to a modified Englishness; University College, though a public school, took no boarders; but Charterhouse had all the marks of what in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries counted as a post-Arnoldian public school. On the plateau stood an extended, Gothic, towered and turreted college designed by the younger of two Philip Hardwicks, and quite ungothically surrounded by a swathe of playing fields.
