Maxwell Fry (1899–1987) was an English modernist architect, writer and painter. Born in Liscard, Cheshire, he trained at Liverpool's school of architecture in the neo-Georgian classicism of Charles Reilly, then turned to modernism and became closely involved in the MARS Group, the English branch of CIAM; he practised with Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret. From the 1940s he and his wife, the architect Jane Drew, designed mainly educational buildings in Ghana and Nigeria, and in the 1950s they spent three years with Le Corbusier creating Chandigarh, the new capital of Punjab. He received the RIBA Royal Gold Medal in 1964.
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The Sun House in Hampstead (1936) is among his best-known houses of the 1930s and is listed Grade II*. Kensal House in Ladbroke Grove (1937), two curved blocks of 68 flats for the Gas Light and Coke Company, developed with the social reformer Elizabeth Denby and with a community centre, laundry and nursery school, was the first modernist block in Britain designed for working-class tenants. The Times considered the University of Ibadan (c. 1955) in Nigeria his most notable work in West Africa.
