Witold Rybczynski
Emeritus professor of urbanism at the University of Pennsylvania
Witold Rybczynski, Hon. FAIA, is an emeritus professor of urbanism at the University of Pennsylvania. Rybczynski has designed and built houses as a registered architect, as well as doing practical experiments in low-cost housing, which took him to Mexico, Nigeria, India, the Philippines, and China. He has written for the Atlantic, New Yorker, New York Review of Books, and the New York Times, and has been architecture critic for Saturday Night, Wigwag, and Slate. From 2004 to 2012 he served on the U. S. Commission of Fine Arts. The recipient of the 2007 Vincent Scully Prize, he was honored in 2014 with the National Design Award for Design Mind from the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum. He is a prolific author whose twenty published books include Now I Sit Me Down, How Architecture Works, The Biography of a Building, The Look of Architecture and HOME: A Short History of an Idea.