Background
Born in Westfield, Massachusetts, he was a son of architect John W. Ross. 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.
Education
Albert Ross attended grammar school in Westfield and later in Davenport, Iowa, where he went on to high school, finishing in 1884.
Career
After leaving that firm in 1897, he started the firm of Ackerman and 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.
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.
lieutenant 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:
Gloversville Free Library, Gloversville, New York, Beaux Arts building listed on the National Register of Historic Places (NHRP)
Pittsfield Public Library, Pittsfield, Maine.
NRHP-listed for its architecture
Columbus Metropolitan Library, Columbus, Ohio, formally known as the Carnegie Building
Carnegie Library, Denver, Colorado. Now known as the McNichols Civic Center Building (1910)
East Orange Public Library, East Orange, New Jersey
Union County Courthouse, Elizabeth, New Jersey
Carnegie Library, Washington, District of Columbia, now the Historical Society of Washington, District of Columbia Exterior design for Draper Hall, State University at Albany, Albany, New York (1909)
Milwaukee County Courthouse, Milwaukee, Wisconsin (1931)
Carnegie Library, Good Will Home Association, Hinckley, Maine
Montclair Art Museum, Montclair, New Jersey (1914)
Needham Free Public Library, Needham, Massachusetts (1904)
Old Town Public Library, Old Town, Maine (1904).