About the Author

Joseph Rykwert CBE (born 1926) is Paul Philippe Cret Professor Emeritus of Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, and one of the foremost architectural historians and critics of his generation. He has spent most of his working life in the United Kingdom and America. Rykwert is the author of many influential works on architecture, including The Idea of a Town (1963), On Adam's House in Paradise(1972), The Dancing Column (1996) and The Seduction of Place (2000). All his books have been translated into several languages. Patrick Hodgkinson, who has died aged 85, was the architect of one of the most original urban creations of the past half-century, the Brunswick Centre in Bloomsbury, central London. Conceived in the late 1950s but not completed until the 70s, the development stemmed from the marriage of big money - in the persons of the property developer Alec Colman and the McAlpine construction dynasty - and art, in the persons of Hodgkinson and his then employer, Leslie Martin, the architect best known for his work on the Royal Festival Hall.