Albert Chase McArthur

Albert Chase McArthur (February 2, 1881 – March 1951) was a Prairie School architect, and the designer of the Arizona Biltmore Hotel in Phoenix, Arizona.

Albert McArthur was born on February 2, 1881 in Dubuque, Iowa. 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 to build the Edward E. Boynton House (1908) in Rochester, New York.

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, Frank Lloyd Wright 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 Sullivanstyle 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 in the class of 1905. Though he never graduated he was 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,

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, all three of the McArthur brothers moved to Hollywood, California in 1932. Albert Chase McArthur died in March 1951 in California.

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