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.^[1]

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.^[1][2]

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.^[3] From 2004 to 2010, he was architecture critic for Slate.^[4]

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.^[5] 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.^[6]

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.^[7][8][9]

In 2007 Rybczynski was the recipient of the Seaside Prize and the Vincent Scully Prize, awarded by the National Building Museum.^[1] Rybczynski is a Senior Fellow of the Design Futures Council.^[10] In 2014 he received a National Design Award for Design Mind from the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum.^[11]

Rybczynski is an honorary fellow of the American Institute of Architects, and an honorary member of the American Society of Landscape Architects.^[1] He has received the AIA Collaborative Honors, and the Pennsylvania AIA President's Award.^[12][13] He holds honorary doctorates from McGill University and the University of Western Ontario.^[1]

External videos
Booknotes interview with Rybczynski on A Clearing in the Distance, 17 October 1999, C-SPAN
Presentation by Rybczynski on A Clearing in the Distance, 12 May 1999, C-SPAN
Presentation by Rybczynski on One Good Turn, 13 September 2000, C-SPAN

• 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) ISBN 978-0374223212^[14]
• 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)

• Natalia Rybczynski

Notes

• Official website
• Author page at Penguin Canada
• Faculty page at University of Pennsylvania Archived 13 October 2004 at the Wayback Machine
• Author page at Simon & Schuster
• Appearances on C-SPAN