ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an autobiography of Joseph Rykwert that 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. Cambridge was an ideal place for exercising a new flair. It had one of the great urban walks in Britain, which he took most days from the School of Architecture in Scroope Terrace at the south end of it: walking north, past the somewhat overbearing portico of the Fitzwilliam Museum, between shapely, small-scale Peterhouse, and facing it Pembroke College; then the soberly neo-Gothic sandstone University Press opposite the knapped flint Anglo-Saxon tower of St Benet's.
