Born: March 1, 1943 in Edinburgh, Scotland
Early days. His father, Witold, was an electrical engineer and his mother Anna was a law student. They married in Warsaw, Poland in 1937. At the onset of the war they both escaped separately to England. .Rybczynski was born in Edinburgh and raised in Surrey, England before moving at a young age to Canada. He attended Loyola High School (Montreal). He received Bachelor of Architecture (1966) and Master of Architecture (1972) degrees from McGill University in Montreal.
Career. Rybczynski has written more than 300 articles and papers on the subject of housing, architecture, and technology, many of which are aimed at a non-technical readership and have earned considerable readership and respect, in a wide variety of magazines, including The Wilson Quarterly. Currently, he writes many of these articles as architecture critic for Slate. After twenty years spent teaching at McGill University,Montreal, Canada he now lives in Philadelphia and is the Martin and Margy Meyerson Professor of Urbanism at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is also founding co-editor of the Wharton Real Estate Review. He currently serves on the U. S. Commission of Fine Arts. In one of his latest books, My Two Polish Grandfathers, he shows that people can lose everything, overcome stunning odds to survive, remake themselves in a foreign country, learn a new language and culture, and then do it again. The book is a clear affirmation of Rybczynski's own path toward becoming an architect and one of today's most original thinkers.
Awards and recognition. His book A Clearing in the Distance: Frederick Law Olmsted and North America in the Nineteenth Century won the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize in 2000. In 2007 he was the recipient of the Seaside Prize and the Vincent Scully Prize, awarded by the National Building Museum. Rybczynski is a Senior Fellow of the Design Futures Council. He is an honorary fellow of the American Institute of Architects, and an honorary member of the American Society of Landscape Architects. He has received the AIA Collaborative Honors, and the Pennsylvania AIA President's Award. He holds honorary doctorates from McGill University and the University of Western Ontario.
This article uses material from the Wikipedia article "Witold Rybczynski." Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License :
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