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.

Early Years

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 Chase. Warren McArthur was a business partner with Edward Everett Boynton in the Hamilton Lantern Company, and it was through McArthur that Boynton commissioned Wright to build the Boynton House (1908) in Rochester, New York. [ [http://www.waymarking.com/waymarks/WM1CQM E. E. Boynton House - Frank Lloyd Wright Designed Buildings on Waymarking.com ] ] [ [http://vintageviews.org/vv-tl/text/Boynton.html Historic American Buildings Survey:P. E. Boynton House ] ]

Warren McArthur Sr. was dubbed the "Pioneer Salesman of Tubular Lanterns." He sold more lanterns than any other man. 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-producing companies. In 1912, Warren McArthur Jr. designed what has been called the Short-Globe Tubular Lantern. [A Leaf from the Past; Then and Now; Origin of the Late Robert Edwin Dietz, Frederick Dietz - New York (N.Y.) 1914]

For Warren McArthur, Frank Lloyd Wright designed the McArthur House of 1892, 4852 South Kenwood Avenue Chicago 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 style arched main entrance. This was among the houses that led to Wright’s dismissal from Sullivan’s employ. The house would have been very familiar to all three of the McArthur boys and may have prompted Albert McArthur’s vocational interest in architecture.

Albert McArthur was educated at the Armour Institute of Technology (later the Illinois Institute of Technology) in Chicago and graduated from Harvard University in the class of 1905.

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 Barry Byrne, Walter Burley Griffin, 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!” [“My Father”, John Lloyd Wright, 1995]

McArthur continued his education in Austria and Italy, opening an architectural firm in Chicago with partner Arthur S. Coffin in 1912. McArthur moved his practice to Phoenix in 1925. The Biltmore is his most significant accomplishment. 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. [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 often underplayed the contributions of those who were associated with him. 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." [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. [Arizona State University Library, special collections biography]

References