Professor Frank Salmon
- Professor of the History of Classical Architecture
- Director of Postgraduate Education (2025-26)
- Fellow of St John's College (President 2015-19)
- Director of Studies for St John's and Downing Colleges
- Director of the Ax:son Johnson Centre for the Study of Classical Architecture (csca.aha.cam.ac.uk)
Contact
About
Frank Salmon specialises in the history of classical architecture from the ancient Graeco-Roman world to the present day, his area of particular focus being neo-classical and Italianate architecture in Britain and Europe from 1700 to 1900. Since 2021 he has been Director of the Ax:son Johnson Centre for the Study of Classical Architecture (CSCA), based in the Faculty of Architecture and History of Art in collaboration with the Faculty of Classics and housed at the neo-classical Downing College. The Centre is generously funded by the Swedish Axel and Margarent Ax:son Johnson Foundation for Public Benefit.
Educated at Cambridge and at the Courtauld Institute of Art, Salmon lectured at the University of Manchester from 1989 to 2002 and was then Assistant Director for Academic Activities at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art in London where he was also an adjunct Associate Professor of the History of Art at the Mellon Centre's mother institution, Yale University. He returned to Cambridge in 2006 and served as Head of Department from 2009 to 2012. He was the President of St John's College from 2015 to 2019. Among the many public bodies on which he has served, Professor Salmon was (from 2012 to 2018) a member of the national Historic England Advisory Committee, advising the Government's statutory body on major cases involving listed buildings and scheduled monuments. In 2020 he became a Trustee of Sir John Soane's Museum in London, representing the Society of Antiquaries - of which he is Fellow. In 2025 he appeared on BBC Radio 4 in an edition of In our time about Soane.
Research
Frank Salmon's first book, Building on Ruins: The Rediscovery of Rome and English Architecture (Ashgate, 2000) jointly won the 2001 Whitfield Prize of the Royal Historical Society and also recieved the 2002 Spiro Kostof Prize of the American Society of Architectural Historians. In 2006 he edited a volume for Yale University Press, Summerson and Hitchcock: Centenary Essays on Architectural Historiography. Subsequently he worked on Greek archaeology and antiquarianism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, publishing major essays in S. Weber Soros, ed., James 'Athenian' Stuart (Yale University Press, 2006) and on C.R. Cockerell and the discovery of the entasis of the Parthenon in The Persistence of the Classical (Philip Wilson, 2009), a book that he also edited. His substantial reassessment of William Kent's public architecture, including unbuilt designs for new Houses of Parliament of the 1730s, appeared in William Kent: Designing Georgian Britain (Yale University Press, 2013), the book that accompanied the major Kent exhibition held at the Bard Center, New York, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2014. The book Royalty and Architecture: Visions and Ambitions of European Monarchs and Nobility (Bokförlaget Stolpe, 2024), co-edited with Clive Aslet, included his own essay on British nobles as architects in the Hanoverian period. His most recent book is Stockholms arkitektur: Från barock till postmodernism (Bokförlaget Stolpe, 2025), a book that brought together an international team of scholars to describe the emergence of Stockholm as a modern European capital in the period 1625 to 2000. The volume included Salmon's reappraisal of Stockholm's architecture of the first half of the nineteenth century, '1810-1860: Kosmopolitisk och kommersiell klassicism'. An English edition of this book will appear in autumn 2026. His full list of publications, including many articles, papers and chapters, can be seen in his list of Publications.
Currently Salmon is working on a book about Victorian architecture in Britain that was inspired by the buildings of the Italian Renaissance, and in 2026 he will take up the editorship of The Georgian Group Journal.
Over his long career Professor Salmon has supervised the research of over 20 PhD students and still more MPhil students. As he approaches retirement he is unlikely to take on further research students unless they are working in areas immediately cognate with his own interests and those of the CSCA