Albert Randolph Ross

Albert Randolph Ross was born in 1868 in Westfield, Massachusetts, a son of architect John W. Ross. In 1874, the father relocated his practice to Davenport, Iowa, where Albert Ross graduated from high school in 1884.[1]

After working from 1884 to 1887 as a draftsman in his father's office, Ross moved to New York where he studied sculpture at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He worked for a year for architect Charles Day Swan in Buffalo, New York, and beginning in 1891 through 1897, for the architecture firm McKim, Mead and White in New York.[1][2] In 1898, he formed a partnership under the name of Ackerman & Ross with architect William S. Ackerman, a partnership they dissolved in 1901.[2]

In 1927, when he was awarded a $10,000 prize in a competition to design a new courthouse for Milwaukee out of 33 who submitted proposals,[3] he told the Milwaukee Journal why he settled on a traditional design:[4]

When I went into the competition I considered whether to design a building in the modern and experimental trend for a great public courthouse. I made modern sketches, but in my opinion they fell flat for this purpose. They were not typical and expressive of public work, so I turned to that type established by our forefathers.... I have no quarrel with trends in modern architecture. I take a fling at it myself. But it simply won't do for public buildings. It violates the dictates of a definite style built up through one hundred and fifty years of our history. A departure into modernism would not be suitable for a courthouse. We must be trained slowly to things violently new. The public's money cannot rightly be used to force experiments down its throat.

In 1901, Ross married Susan Husted, from Brookline, Massachusetts.[1] From 1901 until 1948 his main residence was in New York City, but he also maintained a summer residence on Negro Island, near Boothbay Harbor, Maine,[2] where he died on October 27, 1948.[2]

Media related to Albert Randolph Ross at Wikimedia Commons

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  The Central Public Library (now the Historical Society of Washington, D.C.), completed 1902 by Ackerman & Ross.
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  Taunton Public Library, Taunton, Massachusetts, completed 1903.
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  Carnegie Library, Atlantic City, New Jersey, completed in 1903.
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  Carnegie Library, Old Town, Maine, completed 1904.
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  Gloversville Free Library, Gloversville, New York, completed in 1904.
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  Cragin Memorial Library, Colchester, Connecticut, dedicated July 5, 1905.
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  Public Library, Pittsfield, Maine, completed in 1906.
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  Uinta County Library, Evanston, Wyoming, completed in 1906.
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  Carnegie Library, Columbus, Ohio, completed in 1907.
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  Good Will-Hinckley Library, Hinckley, Maine, dedicated in 1907.
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  Union Soldiers and Sailors Monument in Baltimore, designed by Ross with sculpture by Adolph Alexander Weinman, dedicated in 1909.
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  Denver Public Library, Denver, Colorado, completed in 1910.
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  Montclair Art Museum, Montclair, New Jersey, completed in 1914.
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  Milwaukee County Courthouse, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, completed in 1931.