It’s not that writers and critics haven’t won the RIBA’s Gold Medal before – John Summerson, Nikolaus Pevsner and Colin Rowe have all received it, but it hasn’t happened for almost two decades.
That makes Joseph Rykwert’s receipt of this year’s award all the more welcome as it recognises the importance of thinking and writing to a profession that may have seemed to drift more recently into image-making. Rykwert introduced a complexity, a sense of history, anthropology and meaning into a flagging late modernist era and was pivotal in reinvigorating practice by placing an architecture that had become rather tired and self-referential back in a broader cultural and social context.
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