Joseph Rykwert, an architectural historian who challenged Modernism’s blank-slate approach to architecture and urban design, insisting that healthy communities grew out of deeply felt traditions and values — a position that helped fuel later efforts to make cities more livable and humane — died on Oct. 7 at his home in London. He was 98.

His stepdaughter, Marina Engel, confirmed the death.

Like the critic Lewis Mumford and the writer Jane Jacobs, Dr. Rykwert criticized the embrace of blandly functional architecture in the middle of the 20th century.

During the rush to rebuild European cities after World War II, architects and planners inspired by Modernist ideas frequently ignored the way their communities had been shaped by centuries of received wisdom and individual decisions. What had made those cities special, Dr. Rykwert asserted, was not their efficiency but their reflection of shared values.

“To consider the town or city a symbolic pattern, as the ancients did, seems utterly alien and pointless,” he wrote in “The Idea of a Town: The Anthropology of Urban Form in Rome, Italy and the Ancient World” (1964).

Much of his scholarship revolved around the way the past, especially Greco-Roman architecture, filtered down into later eras, and he praised architects who he felt tapped into that heritage — among them, Frank Lloyd Wright, Alvar Aalto and Louis Kahn — even if they identified as Modernists.

Although Dr. Rykwert spent most of his career in academia, his work reached beyond design schools to influence practicing architects and general readers. He was also one of only four writers to receive the Gold Medal from the Royal Institute of British Architects, one of the architecture world’s highest honors. And in 2014, he was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire, for service to the field of architecture.