Kevin A. Lynch

Lynch became professor emeritus in 1978, but continued to write and practice architecture. He died of a heart attack at his summer home at Gay Head on Martha's Vineyard on April 25, 1984.

Lynch's most famous work, The Image of the City (1960), is the result of a five-year study on how observers take in information of the city. Using three American cities as examples (Boston, Jersey City and Los Angeles), Lynch reported that users understood their surroundings in consistent and predictable ways, forming mental maps with five elements:

In 1954, after receiving a grant from the Ford Foundation to study urban form in Italy, Lynch and his MIT teaching colleague György Kepes were awarded a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to study perceptions of the urban environment and urban form. In 1958 Lynch wrote an essay ‘The theory of urban form’ with Lloyd Rodwin where the city is described through the complementary of two systems – flows and adapted spaces – interpreted starting from a group of descriptive categories of urban form. Lynch and Kepes' research was published in 1960 as Lynch's book The Image of the City. In 1970, Lynch received funding from UNESCO to study the use of cities by young people in urban areas of Salta, Melbourne, Toluca, and Krakow, a project summarized in his book Growing Up in Cities (1977).

After graduation, Lynch began work in Greensboro, North Carolina as an urban planner but was soon recruited to teach at MIT by Lloyd Rodwin. He began lecturing at MIT the following year, becoming an assistant professor in 1949, a tenured associate professor in 1955, and a full professor in 1963.

A student of architect Frank Lloyd Wright before training in city planning, Lynch spent his academic career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, teaching there from 1948 to 1978. He practiced site planning and urban design professionally with Carr/Lynch Associates, later known as Carr, Lynch, and Sandell.

Three weeks after his wedding, Lynch was drafted into the Army Corps of Engineers, serving in the siege of Peleliu, the Philippines and Japan through January 1946. After the war, he completed his undergraduate education at MIT and received a Bachelor's degree in city planning in 1947.

Anne Borders Lynch and Kevin Lynch were married in 1941 and had four children. The Lynches were long-term residents of Martha's Vineyard, where Anne continued spending her summers until her death in 2011.

Kevin Andrew Lynch (January 7, 1918 – April 25, 1984) was an American urban planner and author. He is known for his work on the perceptual form of urban environments and was an early proponent of mental mapping. His most influential books include The Image of the City (1960), a seminal work on the perceptual form of urban environments, and What Time is This Place? (1972), which theorizes how the physical environment captures and refigures temporal processes.

Lynch was born as the youngest child of an Irish-American family on January 7, 1918. He was raised in the Hazel Avenue neighborhood in Chicago's North Shore suburbs. After graduating from the Francis Parker School in 1935, Lynch matriculated at Yale University intending to study architecture. Finding its pedagogy too conservative, he left to study under Frank Lloyd Wright at Taliesin in Spring Green, Wisconsin. Lynch later stated that Wright was a great influence, but disagreed with his individualistic social philosophy. Leaving Wright after a year and a half, he enrolled at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York to study engineering in 1939, but did not complete the program and went to work for Chicago architect Paul Schweikher. In 1941, Lynch married Anne Borders, a fellow graduate of the Parker School.