Robert Campbell

Robert Campbell (March 31, 1937 – April 29, 2025) was an American architect and Pulitzer Prize-winning writer. For 40 years he was an architecture critic for the Boston Globe. He lived and worked in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Early life and education Robert Douglas Campbell Jr. was born March 31, 1937, in Buffalo, New York. His father was an accountant; his mother, Amy (Armitage) Campbell, was a homemaker. He was a graduate of Harvard College, where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa, the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, and the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where he received the Appleton Traveling Fellowship and Francis Kelley Prize.

Career Architect and critic Beginning in 1973 Campbell was the architecture critic for the Boston Globe. His last piece for the Globe ran in 2017. which he helped found.

In 1997 he was architect-in-residence at the American Academy in Rome. In 2002 he helped plan and appeared in a television series, "Beyond the Big Dig".

Poet and photographer Campbell's poems appeared in the Atlantic Monthly and Harvard Review, among other publications. His photographs were published widely.

Teaching Campbell taught at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, the Boston Architectural College, and the University of North Carolina. He was also a visiting scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. From 1993 to 2002 he was visiting Sam Gibbons Eminent Scholar in Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of South Florida, and in 2002 he was Max Fisher Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan. In 2003 he was a senior fellow in the National Arts Journalism Program at Columbia University.

Death Campbell died at an assisted living home in Cambridge, on April 29, 2025, at the age of 88. Campbell was one of two architecture critics to be honored with the 2018 Vincent Scully Prize, awarded by the National Building Museum; his fellow honoree was Inga Saffron, who is architecture critic of The Philadelphia Inquirer.

Partial bibliography 1992: (with Peter Vanderwarker) 2002: (with Curtis W. Fentress, et al.)