Biography
Critchlow was educated at the Summerhill School and the Royal College of Art. He performed national service in the Royal Air Force from 1951 to 1953.
Having been originally trained as a classical painter, he has authored many books on geometry, including Order in Space, Islamic Pattern as a Cosmological Art, and Time Stands Still. He has also contributed the forewords to English editions of works by Titus Burckhardt, Frithjof Schuon, and others.
Critchlow was formerly a lecturer at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London for twelve years, and had been a professor of Islamic Art at the Royal College of Art in London from 1975 for many years. He founded Visual Islamic and Traditional Arts (VITA) school in 1984, which moved from the Royal College of Art to The Prince's Institute of Architecture in 1992–3, where he was director of research. The institute later evolved into The Prince's Foundation, within which Prince's School of Traditional Arts was housed. He is a professor emeritus at VITA and serves as director for research. He also taught at the The Prince's Foundation for the Built Environment in London.
He is a leading expert in sacred architecture and sacred geometry and founded Kairos, a society which investigates, studies, and promotes traditional values of art and science. He served there as director of studies.
Critchlow's architectural work includes the Krishnamurti Study Centre in England, the Lindisfarne Chapel in Crestone, Colorado, in the United States with a special design for the vaulting of the dome, and The Sri Sathya Sai Institute of Higher Medical Sciences in Puttaparthi, India. Isaac Tigrett, who had founded the Hard Rock Cafe enterprise, secured Critchlow’s aid to design a hospital in the Prasanthi Nilayam ashram in Puttuparthi. Critchlow's use of sacred geometry played a major role in these architectural designs and projects.
He is president of the Temenos Academy.
Read more about this topic: Keith Critchlow
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