Adam Frampton

Design Critic in Architecture

Adam Snow Frampton, AIA is an architect and a Principal of Only If, a New York City-based design practice for architecture and urbanism. He founded Only If in 2013, which has since been recognized as part of Architectural Record’s Design Vanguard (2022), Domus Magazine’s 50 Best Architecture Firms in the World (2020), Architect Magazine’s Next Progressives (2019), and as part of the AIA’s New Practices New York (2018). Only If’s work has been nominated for the Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize (2022), and has been published in the New Yorker, the Wall Street Journal, Interior Design, Architect Magazine, Architectural Digest, Fast Company, Frame, and the Architect’s Newspaper. Frampton is also a Visiting Critic at the Rice University School of Architecture, and he has taught at Columbia University GSAPP, Parsons, Syracuse University, and the University of Kentucky.

He is the co-author of Cities Without Ground: A Hong Kong Guidebook (2012) which maps Hong Kong’s three-dimensional networks of pedestrian circulation and public space. His work and research have been exhibited in the 12th, 14th, 16th, and 17th Venice Biennale, the Museum of Modern Art, the M+ Hong Kong, Storefront for Art and Architecture, the Center for Architecture, and the Van Alen Institute, New York. Previously, he worked as an Associate at the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) in Rotterdam and Hong Kong from 2006 to 2013. He holds an M.Arch from Princeton University and is a licensed Architect in the United States and the Netherlands.