American architectural partnership formed in New York in 1972. Robert Michael Kliment (b Prague, 9 June 1933) studied at Yale (M.Arch, 1959) and worked for Mitchell/Giurgola in Philadelphia and New York from 1961 to 1971. Frances Halsband (b New York, 30 Oct 1943) received her Master of Architecture degree from Columbia University in 1968. They married in 1971 and in the following year established an architectural practice under the name R. M. Kliment Architect, renaming it R. M. Kliment & Frances Halsband Architects in 1978. The firm’s buildings exhibit subtle references to classicism, modernism and post-modernism. The Computer Science Building (1983) at Columbia University, New York, for example, has an entrance facing an open plaza. It is proportionally symmetrical and recalls classical and Renaissance façades, but its surfaces are pared down to flat, undecorated planes. More playful, yet equally restrained, is the Studio House (1986), Woodstock, NY, with its angular gable roofs, shingled and brick walls, and triangular verandah. A new entrance building to the Long Island Road at Penn Station, New York, was completed in 1994. Both partners taught and lectured widely in the USA. In 1991 Halsband became Dean of the School of Architecture at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, and was also elected president of the New York chapter of the American Institute of Architects. Her writings on contemporary architecture develop four theoretical currents: a theory of place (landscape as context), a theory of preservation (integrating history into the present), a theory of craft (current concerns with craft moving towards engineering as a source of form) and a theory of civic design (developing new conceptions of public space). Such themes can be related to the firm’s works.