Franklin Toker

Born in Montreal in 1944, Toker obtained degrees in fine arts from McGill University, Oberlin College, and a PhD from Harvard University before obtaining a faculty position at the University of Pittsburgh, retiring in 2018. Toker died on April 19, 2021 in his home in Squirrel Hill, City of Pittsburgh.

Toker's The Church of Notre-Dame in Montréal won the Alice Davis Hitchcock Award of the Society of Architectural Historians. He was awarded the Porter Prize of the College Art Association for his article in The Art Bulletin. He was known for his book, Fallingwater Rising: Frank Lloyd Wright, E. J. Kaufmann, and America's Most Extraordinary House, about the creation of Frank Lloyd Wright's masterpiece Fallingwater, which was named a New York Times notable book of 2003. He was also noted for his works on the architecture of Pittsburgh, but his international reputation rested on his "Florence Duomo Project", (Brepols Publishing), of which two volumes were published. CAA Reviews for February 6, 2014 called the work in Florence, "one of the major archaeological campaigns of this generation," and said of The Florence Duomo Project: "Stepping back to digest this material, as Toker has been able to do with such rigor, candor, insight, and sensitivity, we witness the way in which successful collaboration can produce spectacular results—results that together can, quite literally, alter the face of history."

Franklin K. Toker (29 April 1944 – 19 April 2021) was a Canadian-American professor of the history of art and architecture at the University of Pittsburgh and the author of nine books on the history of art and architecture, ranging from the excavations he conducted under the famed Cathedral of Saint Maria del Fiore, Florence to 21st century American urbanism. A past president of the Society of Architectural Historians, in 1979 Toker was the winner of a Guggenheim Fellowship in Architecture, Planning, & Design.