Witold Rybczynski (born in 1 March 1943, in Edinburgh, Scotland), is a Canadian-American architect, professor and writer.
Rybczynski was born in Edinburgh of Polish parentage and raised in Surrey, England before moving at a young age to Canada. He received Bachelor of Architecture (1966) and Master of Architecture (1972) degrees from McGill University in Montreal.
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, 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.
His book A Short History of an Idea was nominated for the 1986 Governor General's Award for non-fiction.
His book Frederick Law Olmsted and North America in the Nineteenth Century won the Anthony J. Lukas Prize and was short-listed for the Charles Taylor Prize in 2000.
In 2007 he was the recipient of the Vincent Scully Prize. Rybczynski is a Senior Fellow of the Design Futures Council.