Kenneth B. Frampton CBE

Kenneth B. Frampton CBE is regarded as one of the world’s leading historians of modernist architecture. He is a British architect, critic and historian. Frampton is the Ware Professor Emeritus of Architecture at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation at Columbia University, New York. He has lived in the United States permanently since the mid-1980s.


Frampton studied architecture at the Guildford School of Art, Surrey, and the Architectural Association School of Architecture, London. He has taught at the Princeton University School of Architecture (1966–71) and the Bartlett School of Architecture, London (1980), among other places. He has been a member of the faculty at Columbia University since 1972, and that same year he became a fellow of the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in New York and a co-founding editor of its magazine Oppositions. Frampton was a member of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture Master Jury in 2001.


The Canadian Centre for Architecture holds Frampton’s archive, and in 2015 his library was acquired by the Department of Architecture, The University of Hong Kong. Frampton was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the Queen’s Birthday Honours 2021 for his services to architecture.

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