Albert Chase McArthur (February 2, 1881 – March 1951) was a

Prairie School Prairie School is a late 19th- and early 20th-century architectural style, most common in the Midwestern United States. The style is usually marked by horizontal lines, flat or hipped roofs with broad overhanging eaves, windows grouped ...

architect An architect is a person who plans, designs and oversees the construction of buildings. To practice architecture means to provide services in connection with the design of buildings and the space within the site surrounding the buildings that h ...

, and the designer of the Arizona Biltmore Hotel in

Phoenix, Arizona Phoenix ( ; nv, Hoozdo; es, Fénix or , yuf-x-wal, Banyà:nyuwá) is the List of capitals in the United States, capital and List of cities and towns in Arizona#List of cities and towns, most populous city of the U.S. state of Arizona, with 1 ...

Early years

Albert McArthur was born on February 2, 1881, in

Dubuque, Iowa Dubuque (, ) is the county seat of Dubuque County, Iowa, United States, located along the Mississippi River. At the time of the 2020 census, the population of Dubuque was 59,667. The city lies at the junction of Iowa, Illinois, and Wisconsin, a r ...

. He was the eldest of the three sons of Warren McArthur Sr. and Minnie Jewel McArthur née Chase. Warren McArthur Sr. was a business partner with Edward Everett Boynton in the Hamilton Lantern Company, and it was through McArthur that Boynton commissioned

Frank Lloyd Wright Frank Lloyd Wright (June 8, 1867 – April 9, 1959) was an American architect, designer, writer, and educator. He designed more than 1,000 structures over a creative period of 70 years. Wright played a key role in the architectural movements o ...

to build the

Edward E. Boynton House The Edward E. Boynton House (1908) was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in Rochester, New York. This privately owned prairie-style home was commissioned by widower Edward Everett Boynton and his teenage daughter Beulah Boynton. According to Beula ...

(1908) in

Rochester, New York Rochester () is a City (New York), city in the U.S. state of New York (state), New York, the county seat, seat of Monroe County, New York, Monroe County, and the fourth-most populous in the state after New York City, Buffalo, New York, Buffalo, ...

. Warren McArthur Sr. was sometimes referred to as the "Pioneer Salesman of Tubular Lanterns." He was the executive sales manager of the C. T. Ham Company of Rochester NY, the R. E. Deitz Company of Chicago and other affiliated lamp-production companies. In 1912 Warren McArthur Jr. designed what has been called the Short-Globe Tubular Lantern. For Warren McArthur,

designed the McArthur House of 1892, 4852 South Kenwood Avenue in Chicago, Illinois. It is one of Wright's so-called "bootleg" houses; a two-story house with Roman brick halfway up the first floor exterior, and a

Louis Sullivan Louis Henry Sullivan (September 3, 1856 – April 14, 1924) was an American architect, and has been called a "father of skyscrapers" and "father of modernism". He was an influential architect of the Chicago School, a mentor to Frank Lloy ...

style arched main entrance. This was among the houses that led to Wright’s dismissal from Sullivan’s employ. Albert McArthur was educated at the Armour Institute of Technology (later the Illinois Institute of Technology) in Chicago and attended

Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of highe ...

in the class of 1905. Though he never graduated he was later asked to be the first president of the Harvard Club of Phoenix. McArthur worked with architect Frank Lloyd Wright between 1907 and 1909. This practice was a remarkable collection of creative architectural designers. As his son, John Lloyd Wright, says, :“ William Drummond, Francis

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Walter Burley Griffin Walter Burley Griffin (November 24, 1876February 11, 1937) was an American architect and landscape architect. He is known for designing Canberra, Australia's capital city and the New South Wales towns of Griffith and Leeton. He has been cr ...

, Albert McArthur, Marion Mahony, Isabel Roberts and George Willis were the draftsmen. Five men, two women. They wore flowing ties, and smocks suitable to the realm. The men wore their hair like Papa, all except Albert, he didn’t have enough hair... I know that each one of them was then making valuable contributions to the pioneering of the modern American architecture for which my father gets the full glory, headaches and recognition today!” McArthur continued his education in Austria and Italy, opening an architectural firm in Chicago with partner Arthur S. Coffin in 1912. He moved his practice to Phoenix in 1925. The Biltmore is his most important design. In the course of the

Great Depression The Great Depression (19291939) was an economic shock that impacted most countries across the world. It was a period of economic depression that became evident after a major fall in stock prices in the United States. The economic contagio ...

, all three of the McArthur brothers moved to

Hollywood, California Hollywood is a neighborhood in the central region of Los Angeles, California. Its name has come to be a shorthand reference for the U.S. film industry and the people associated with it. Many notable film studios, such as Columbia Picture ...

, in 1932. Albert Chase McArthur died in March 1951 in California.Arizona State University Library, special collections biography

The Arizona Biltmore

His brothers, Charles and Warren, Jr., commissioned Albert McArthur to design a resort hotel for them in Phoenix, which is the Arizona Biltmore. Albert contacted Frank Lloyd Wright with an eye toward using Wright’s concrete textile block system for the hotel. The system, perfected by Wright’s son Lloyd in California, was an ideal choice for material that could be produced on site, especially in the desert of Arizona. Wright was in desperate financial and legal shape at the time and sold the McArthur Brothers the right to use his patents for the textile block system although he did not own them, causing considerable embarrassment to the McArthur family when the actual holder of the patents sued the Biltmore Corporation for patent infringement. Albert had married the daughter of a wealthy Jewish

chocolatier A chocolatier is a person or company who makes confectionery from chocolate. Chocolatiers are distinct from chocolate makers, who create chocolate from cacao beans and other ingredients. Education and training Traditionally, chocolatiers, ...

while studying in Vienna; true to his lifelong anti-semitism Wright always referred to Albert's son as Jew-boy. Wright often underplayed the contributions of those who were associated with him and never gave credit. Upon seeing the completed hotel he remarked that "it had turned out as badly as he expected" and then spent the rest of his life trying to claim authorship for this project. Characteristic of this is the letter he wrote to Albert Chase McArthur’s widow, twenty-five years after the Arizona Biltmore’s completion: :"I have always given Albert's name as architect ... and always will. But I know better and so should you." He made similar dismissive remarks at Albert's home immediately after Albert's funeral, and Charles McArthur struck him in the face, knocking him down. The design of the brick used to build the Arizona Biltmore is not a stylized palm tree inspired by FLW as sometimes claimed but Albert Chase McArthur's chop (stylized signature stamp), based on the logarithm of a B-flat minor. When Taliesin restored the Talleys after the 1971/2 fire they recast the bricks from the original molds, but put them in sideways and upside down. Mrs. Talley, thinking that this could be a FLW project, banned Albert Chase McArthur from the property and removed the original thousands of pieces of Warren McArthur furniture which had been a major visual part and asset of the hotel. travelwithattitude.com website, Kate Crawford, November 2002, writing about the Arizona Biltmore There are other works by Albert Chase McArthur in the Phoenix area including a residence for M. D. B. Morgan, completed in 1927, and several houses in the Phoenix Country Club area.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:McArthur, Albert Chase 1881 births 1951 deaths 20th-century American architects Illinois Institute of Technology alumni Harvard University alumni Architects from Arizona