F. R. S. Yorke

Who was F. R. S. Yorke?

Francis Reginald Stevens Yorke, known professionally as F. R. S. Yorke and informally as Kay or K, was an English architect and author.

One of the first native British architects to design in a modernist style, he made numerous contacts with leading European architects while contributing to the Architects Journal in the 1930s, and in 1933 was secretary and founder member of the MARS Group. Between 1935 and 1937 he worked in partnership with the Hungarian architect and former Bauhaus teacher Marcel Breuer, before forming the Yorke, Rosenberg and Mardall partnership in 1944, with whom he designed many post-war buildings including St Thomas' Hospital in London.

Yorke was born in Stratford-upon-Avon, where his father was also an architect, and studied architecture and planning at the Birmingham School of Architecture, where his fellow students included other notable early modernist figures including Richard Sheppard, Frederick Gibberd, Colin Penn and Robert Furneaux Jordan.