ABSTRACT
This chapter presents autobiography of Joseph Rykwert and explores how his life's experiences shaped his working life. He addresses the dualities between which he had to navigate: Jewish/Polish, Polish/British and later, Practice/Scholarship. He spent most of his working life between the USA and UK and worked both as a designer and a writer; as such his ground-breaking ideas and work have had a major impact on the thinking of architects and designers since the 1960s and continue to do so to this day. His new female friend was impressed by the celebrity of a literary acquaintance. His yen for the Indian girl was animated by other discoveries at the time. A great Indian exhibition was about to open at Burlington House, and this prodded the museum authorities, who treated their large stores of Indian sculpture as ethnographic specimens, to reassess them as works of art and give them quite different settings in galleries and museums.
