Background
William Robert Ware, the son of Henry Ware and Mary Lovell (Pickard) Ware, was born in Cambridge, Massachussets He was a half-brother of John Fothergill Waterhouse Ware.
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William Robert Ware, the son of Henry Ware and Mary Lovell (Pickard) Ware, was born in Cambridge, Massachussets He was a half-brother of John Fothergill Waterhouse Ware.
He was educated first in Cambridge, then in Phillips Exeter Academy, and graduated from Harvard College in 1852. From 1852 to 1854 he was a tutor in private families in New York and then returned to Cambridge, where in 1856, after two years in the Lawrence Scientific School, he received the degree of S. B.
He first entered the office of Edward Clarke Cabot in Boston and later became one of the first pupils of the atelier which Richard Hunt had established in his New York office. In 1860 he began practice with an engineer, E. S. Philbrick. Three years later he formed a partnership with Henry Van Brunt. Their office in Boston for many years was among the foremost in the eastern states. Their work includes the First Church, Boston; the former Union Station, Worcester; the Episcopal Theological School, Cambridge; two dormitories, the alteration of the old university library (in which, for the first time, Henri Labrouste's ideas of stack construction were adapted to American use), and the famous Memorial Hall at Harvard. This work is largely under the influence of Ruskin and his English followers, with much use of picturesque details, horizontal lines, and polychrome masonry. The Memorial Hall has in addition big scale and a commendable simplicity of scheme. During his early practice Ware had become more and more impressed with the chaotic character of architectural education. The old apprenticeship system had perished, and there was nothing to take its place. Between 1863 and 1865, therefore, he and Van Brunt established an atelier for students in their own office, adding to the customary design and drawing problems a certain amount of systematic instruction in construction, theory, and history. So successful was this experiment that in 1865 Ware was appointed head of a proposed architectural school in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In preparation he spent a little over a year in Europe, studying especially the architectural education of France and England. When he returned, he brought with him Eugène Létang to take charge of the work in design in the new school, thus establishing in America for the first time the École des Beaux Arts system of training in design. In 1881 he was called to New York to found a school of architecture at Columbia University, at first, strangely enough, as a department under the School of Mines. Here he remained until his retirement as professor emeritus in 1903, after a severe breakdown the year before. He made extensive trips to Europe in 1883, and in 1889-90, and in 1903. At Columbia, as at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he devised a school which, while borrowing widely from the French system, was in no sense an imitation of it, but a new system, based on American needs and American conditions. The two schools exerted an enormous influence on other and younger schools throughout the country, so that Ware may be called the founder of American architectural education in a very real sense. Meanwhile he had not lost touch with the profession as a whole. Though he dissolved his partnership with Van Brunt when he left Boston, he was a member of the designing board of the Pan-American Exposition of 1900 and designed the buildings for the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. He served as architectural expert and adviser for many important architectural competitions. A member of the American Institute of Architects from 1859 and a fellow from 1864, he was extremely active in Institute matters. During his last twelve years he lived quietly at Milton, Massachussets, with his maiden sister Harriet, writing an important series of textbooks. Ware's importance as an educator lies in his keen appreciation of the special problem of American architectural education. His ideals appear clearly as early as 1865 in a paper read before the Society of Arts of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, An Outline of a Course of Architectural Instruction (1866), and are even clearer in a paper read two years later before the Royal Institute of British Architects, "On the Condition of Architecture and of Architectural Education in the United States" (Sessional Papers of the Royal Institute of British Architects, 1866-67).
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He was an honorary member of the Royal Institute of British Architects and of the Société Centrale des Architectes Français, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
To him the architect was much more than a mere technician; he was also an artist, an exponent of a traditional cultural history, and a member of society as a whole. Thus he felt the French system too limited, too concerned with technique. In his lectures, characterized by a fascinating discursiveness, he emphasized continually the cultural, social, and creative side of architecture. He tried in every way to keep the student's mind broad and curious. For the development of the creative side, he borrowed from France the idea of teaching design by projects to be solved under criticism and by an unusual emphasis on freehand drawing. All of these ideas are still alive, vital parts of the American architectural tradition. To this wise teaching were added the charm and winning simplicity of his own benign personality, so well expressed in his appearance during his later years--his silky white hair and beard, and his gracious and gentle expression.
He never married.