William Robert Ware

William Robert Ware
Born	(1832-05-27)May 27, 1832 Cambridge, Massachusetts, US
Died	June 9, 1915(1915-06-09) (aged 83)
Alma mater	Harvard College Lawrence Scientific School
Occupation	Architect
Practice	Philbrick and Ware Ware & Van Brunt
Buildings	Memorial and Weld Halls, Harvard Ether Monument

William Robert Ware (May 27, 1832 – June 9, 1915) was an American architect,^[1] author, and founder of two important American architectural schools.

Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, into a family of the Unitarian clergy, Ware received his own professional education at Milton Academy, Harvard College and Harvard's Lawrence Scientific School. In 1859, he began working for Richard Morris Hunt, the founder of the first American architectural school, the AIA, and the first American to graduate from the École des Beaux-Arts. Soon afterward Ware formed a partnership with the civil engineer Edward S. Philbrick, Philbrick and Ware, and they designed the Swedenborgian High Street Church in Brookline, Massachusetts.

In 1864, Ware partnered with fellow Harvard graduate Henry Van Brunt to form Ware & Van Brunt. Their Boston-area designs include Harvard's Memorial and Weld Halls, the Episcopal Divinity School campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the fountain at the Providence Athenaeum in Providence, Rhode Island, the Walter Hunnewell house (1875) at the Hunnewell estate in Wellesley (then West Needham), and the Ether Monument at the Boston Public Garden.^[2] In 1865, Ware became the first professor of architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Architect Joseph Lyman Silsbee apprenticed under Ware and Van Brunt after graduating MIT in 1869.^{[3][circular reference]}

In 1881, Ware and Van Brunt amicably dissolved their partnership, and Ware moved to New York City to found the School of Architecture at Columbia University, which began as the Architecture Department in the Columbia School of Mines.^[4][5] He retired in 1903 in poor health.

Ware also dabbled briefly in voting systems. He conducted a demonstration STV election of four favorite authors at Harvard University in 1871.^[6][7] At that time, he used the idea of the single transferable vote to devise what is now called, in the U.S., ranked choice voting or instant-runoff voting, later used in several English speaking countries.^[8]

• Selected works
• 
  Memorial Hall (1870), Harvard University
• 
  Lawrence and Reed Halls, Episcopal Divinity School
• 
  Weld Hall (1870), Harvard University

Publications

• The American Vignola (1904)
• The Study of Architectural Drawing in the School of Architecture (1896)
• Modern Perspective: A Treatise Upon the Principles and Practice of Plane and Cylindrical Perspective (1882)
• The Machinery of Politics (1872)

References

1. "William R. Ware". Pennsylvania Capitol Preservation Committee. Retrieved June 19, 2019.
2. "William Robert Ware". MIT Museum. 1996. Archived from the original on April 30, 2016. Retrieved June 19, 2019.
3. Joseph Lyman Silsbee
4. Chewning, J. A. (1979). "William Robert Ware at MIT and Columbia". Journal of Architectural Education. 33 (2): 25–29. doi:10.1080/10464883.1979.10758618. JSTOR 1424350.
5. Chewning, J. A. (1986). William Robert Ware and the beginnings of architectural education in the United States, 1861-1881 (PhD). Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Architecture. hdl:1721.1/14983.
6. Hare, The Election of Representatives, Parliamentary and Municipal, Appendix M. The Preferential Vote (W.R. Ware), p. 350-355
7. "The Machinery of Politics and Proportional Representation, Etc". 1872.
8. "The History of IRV". FairVote archives. Retrieved June 19, 2019.

External links

• The Ether Monument at dcMemorials.com
• William R. Ware papers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• Works by or about William Robert Ware at the Internet Archive