Witold Rybczynski

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Witold Rybczynski
Born1 March 1943 (1943-03) (age 82)
Edinburgh, Scotland
NationalityCanadian-American
Alma mater McGill University
OccupationArchitect
Awards J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize (2000)
Vincent Scully Prize (2007)

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]

Contents

Early life

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]

Career

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]

Awards and honors

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]

Works

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

See also

References

Notes

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 "Witold Rybczynski Weitzman". www.design.upenn.edu. University of Penssylvania. Retrieved 27 July 2025.
  2. ↑ Brown, Patricia. "A Place to Shelter Dreams". NYTimes.com. New York Times. Retrieved 27 July 2025.
  3. ↑ "Authors: Witold Rybczynski". The Atlantic.
  4. ↑ "Authors: Witold Rybczynski". Slate.
  5. ↑ Thomas E. Luebke, ed., Civic Art: A Centennial History of the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, 2013): Appendix B, p. 554.
  6. ↑ "Portrait of a Marriage in Six Homes, The American Scholar, Winter 2021.
  7. ↑ "J. Anthony Lukas Prize Project winners". Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard. Retrieved 16 March 2011.
  8. ↑ "Rybczynski, Witold - Archival Collections Catalogue". archivalcollections.library.mcgill.ca. McGill University.
  9. ↑ "Witold Rybczynski Archives". Literary Review of Canada. Literary Review of Canada.
  10. ↑ "Design Futures Council Senior Fellows" Archived 6 November 2007 at the Wayback Machine
  11. ↑ "Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum Announces Winners of the 15th Annual National Design Awards Smithsonian Institution". www.si.edu. Smithsonian Institution.
  12. ↑ "Past Special Award Recipients". AIA Pennsylvania. American Institute or Architects - Pennsylvania.
  13. ↑ "Book Review, Starred". Publishers Weekly. Retrieved 26 May 2016.
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