Frank Ching

Who is Frank Ching?

Francis D. K. "Frank" Ching is a widely recognized author of books addressing architectural and design graphics. Ching's books have been widely influential and continue to shape the visual language of all fields of design. He is a Professor Emeritus at the University of Washington.

Ching was born and raised in Hawaii. He received his B.Arch. from the University of Notre Dame in 1966. After several years of practice, in 1972 he joined the faculty at Ohio University to teach drawing. To support his lectures in architectural graphics, Ching hand-drew and hand-lettered his lecture notes. These notes were eventually shown to the publisher, Van Nostrand Reinhold, and were published, in 1974, in an edited version as Architectural Graphics,. Ching went on to produce twelve other books, including Building Construction Illustrated and Architecture: Form, Space & Order.

Ching's printing has been adopted by Adobe in its Tekton font family.

Ching was, for a time, an architecture faculty member at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. By the late 1980s he had begun teaching at the University of Washington in the Department of Architecture. He became a full professor in 1991.