Stanley Abercrombie received a B.S. in Architecture from Georgia Tech, a B.Arch. from MIT, and an M.Arch from Columbia University. He was a Loeb Fellow at Harvard University where he also taught a seminar on “Theories of Architectural Evaluation.”

Abercrombie worked in the New York office of Marcel Breuer & Associates for three and a half years and as a designer in the New York office of John Carl Warnecke for five years. While practicing architecture he began writing (first for the Wall Street Journal) reviews of architecture-related books and exhibitions. In 1953 he became a Senior Editor at a new magazine, Architecture Plus. When that ceased publication a year later he became Senior Editor, Architecture, at the AIA Journal, later renamed Architecture. He became Editor-in-Chief of three design magazines, first of Interiors, then of Abitare in America (a short-lived American supplement to the Italian Abitare), and then, for 14 years, Interior Design. In all, he has written a dozen books and published more than 1,500 articles in 46 different magazines and newspapers.

He has served as a Director of the Society of Architectural Historians, as a lecturer at the Smithsonian Institution, as curator of the exhibition "Industrial Elegance" at the Guggenheim Museum SoHo (1993), and as a visiting critic at many architecture and design schools. He was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by the New York School of Interior Design. Abercrombie is a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome, a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects, and an Honorary Fellow of the American Society of Interior Designers.

Largely retired, he now lives in Sonoma, CA, where he was active with the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art as both a curator and exhibition designer, and where he donated 2,000 books on art, architecture, and design, forming the Stanley Abercrombie and Paul Vieyra Art Library. An additional 10,000 books from his collection were bequeathed to the California College of the Arts, in San Francisco.