Ackerman & Ross

Albert Randolph Ross (October 26, 1868 – October 27, 1948) was an American architect. Born in Westfield, Massachusetts, he was a son of architect John W. Ross.

Albert Ross attended grammar school in Westfield and later in Davenport, Iowa, where he went on to high school, finishing in 1884. After working as a draughtsman in his father's Davenport architecture office from 1884 to 1887, he spent a year working for an architect in Buffalo, New York, before joining the New York City firm of McKim, Mead and White in 1891. After leaving that firm in 1897, he started the firm of Ackerman & Ross, which operated from 1898 to 1901.

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, he told the Milwaukee Journal why he settled on a traditional design:

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. From 1901 until 1948 his main residence was on Negro Island, near Boothbay Harbor, Maine. He died October 27, 1948.

Among the buildings that Ross designed were 12 libraries. Some of his notable design projects included:

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