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Abraham James Speyer (December 27, 1913– November 9, 1986) was an American architect and art curator, who also taught at the Illinois Institute of Technology and the University of Athens. As an architect, he is remembered for his house designs, the best known of which is probably the Ben Rose House in Highland Park, Illinois.

Biography
Speyer was born in Pittsburgh on December 27, 1913, the son of Tillie (née Sunstein) and Alexander Crail Speyer. He graduated with a bachelor's degree in architecture from the Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1934, but became progressively disillusioned with the institution's Beaux-Arts approach to the subject, even with an Art Deco. Attracted to the International Style, during the next three years he studied at the Chelsea Polytechnic in London and the Sorbonne University in Paris. In 1939 he obtained a master's degree from the Armour (later, Illinois) Institute of Technology as the first graduate student of Mies van der Rohe, whom Speyer was so keen to study under that in the fall of the previous year he tracked down the newly-arrived émigré from Nazi Germany at the Stevens Hotel in Chicago.

During World War II, Speyer was drafted into the United States Army in 1941. In the South Pacific, he lead a chemical warfare intelligence unit, which later became part of the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives program (the so-called "Monuments Men"). He was promoted to the rank of Major in April 1945, and after being demobilised in 1946 he returned to Chicago, where set up his own architectural practice. He was offered teaching work at the Illinois Institute of Technology later that year, and for the next decade combined this with his architectal work, which was focussed mainly on residential projects. He was made an associate professor in 1952. In 1957, through the Fulbright Program, he moved to the University of Athens in Greece. Before returning to the United States in 1959 following the death of his father, Speyer bought a house on the Aegean island of Hydra, where he spent each summer.

Speyer had been a regular correspondent for Artnews since 1955, and in 1961 he accepted an appointment as Curator of Contemporary (later, Twentieth-century) Art at the Art Institute of Chicago, a position he held until his death.

In 1984, he was elected a trustee of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., following the retirement of Dorothy C. Miller.