Benjamin C. Thompson

Benjamin C. Thompson (July 3, 1918 – August 21, 2002), known as Ben Thompson, was an American architect.

Thompson was born in Saint Paul, Minnesota, spent early years on his family's farm, and received his early education at St. Paul Academy and Avon Old Farms School, a progressive school founded by architect Theodate Pope Riddle in Avon CT. His interest in architecture was nurtured by travels in Europe with his mother, an artist and art collector. In the fall of 1938 he entered the Yale School of Architecture, from which he earned a Bachelor of Architecture degree in 1941. He served for four years in the United States Navy during World War II as a Lieutenant aboard a Destroyer Escort in the North Atlantic and Pacific theaters. He completed his service in the Office of Strategic Services, and provided design services at the United Nations founding conference in San Francisco.

Near the end of the war, Thompson's ship docked in Boston and he was introduced to Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus School and then head of the Harvard Graduate School of Design. After the war, he moved to Lexington, Massachusetts, where he participated with Gropius and others in the design and creation of Six Moon Hill, a neighborhood of modern houses; his first wife Mary Okes Thompson lived in the Moon Hill house through 2004.

Thompson began his career as an architect in 1946, when he helped persuade Gropius and six other architects to form The Architects' Collaborative (TAC) in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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