On Friday, I was thinking that I ought to write something about Joseph Rykwert. I have discovered from a notice in La Repubblica that he actually died on Friday, although there is no further information, other than the fact that he was 98.

He only just made it to the UK, as his brilliant autobiography, Remembering Places, describes, escaping out of Poland by way of Stockholm and Amsterdam. He was a remarkable person, who I got to know when he was still, but only just, a Professor in the Department of Art History and Theory at the University of Essex. In fact, I remember that I had to provide evidence of his intellectual credentials when he was appointed to a lectureship at Cambridge not long afterwards because it had come to the authorities’ notice that he had apparently never completed his training at the Architectural Association. He then moved to the University of Pennsylvania, but must have spent most of every year in London where he kept his library.

He was an impressively wide-ranging intellectual, as interested and involved in the practice of architecture as he was in its history and theory. He was important not just for his own writings, including On Adam’s House in Paradise: The Idea of the Primitive Hut in Architectural History (1972) and The First Moderns: The Architects of the Eighteenth Century (1980), but for his influence on other writers and architects, including David Chipperfield and Daniel Libeskind. In 2014, he was awarded the Gold Medal by the RIBA.