Albert Chase McArthur (February 2, 1881 – March 1951) was a Prairie School

Prairie School

Prairie School was a late 19th and early 20th century architectural style, most common to the Midwestern United States.The works of the Prairie School architects are usually marked by horizontal lines, flat or hipped roofs with broad overhanging eaves, windows grouped in horizontal bands,...

 architect

Architect

An architect is a person trained in the planning, design and oversight of the construction of buildings. To practice architecture means to offer or render services in connection with the design and construction of a building, or group of buildings and the space within the site surrounding the...

, and the designer of the Arizona Biltmore Hotel

Arizona Biltmore Hotel

The Arizona Biltmore Hotel is a resort located in Phoenix near 24th Street and Camelback Road. It recently joined the Hilton Hotels' luxury collection The Waldorf-Astoria Collection and was also featured on the Travel Channel show Great Hotels....

 in Phoenix, Arizona

Phoenix, Arizona

Phoenix is the capital, and largest city, of the U.S. state of Arizona, as well as the sixth most populated city in the United States. Phoenix is home to 1,445,632 people according to the official 2010 U.S. Census Bureau data...

.

Early years

Albert McArthur was born on February 2, 1881 in Dubuque, Iowa

Dubuque, Iowa

Dubuque is a city in and the county seat of Dubuque County, Iowa, United States, located along the Mississippi River. In 2010 its population was 57,637, making it the ninth-largest city in the state and the county's population was 93,653....

. 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 Edward E. Boynton House

Edward E. Boynton House

The Edward E. Boynton House was built in Rochester, New York in 1908. This two-story house is built in the elongated "T" plan. Frank Lloyd Wright won agreement from Boynton to not only design the house but also design the landscape and furnishings as well. It's the furthest east of Wright's Prairie...

 (1908) in Rochester, New York

Rochester, New York

Rochester is a city in Monroe County, New York, south of Lake Ontario in the United States. Known as The World's Image Centre, it was also once known as The Flour City, and more recently as The Flower City...

.

Warren McArthur Sr. was sometimes called 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-producing companies. In 1912 Warren McArthur Jr. designed what has been called the Short-Globe Tubular Lantern.

For Warren McArthur, Frank Lloyd Wright

Frank Lloyd Wright

Frank Lloyd Wright was an American architect, interior designer, writer and educator, who designed more than 1,000 structures and completed 500 works. Wright believed in designing structures which were in harmony with humanity and its environment, a philosophy he called organic architecture...

 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

Louis Sullivan

Louis Henri Sullivan was an American architect, and has been called the "father of skyscrapers" and "father of modernism" He is considered by many as the creator of the modern skyscraper, was an influential architect and critic of the Chicago School, was a mentor to Frank Lloyd Wright, and an...

 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.

Albert McArthur was educated at the Armour Institute of Technology (later the Illinois Institute of Technology

Illinois Institute of Technology

Illinois Institute of Technology, commonly called Illinois Tech or IIT, is a private Ph.D.-granting university located in Chicago, Illinois, with programs in engineering, science, psychology, architecture, business, communications, industrial technology, information technology, design, and law...

) in Chicago and attended Harvard University

Harvard University

Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...

 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,

“William Drummond

William Eugene Drummond

William Eugene Drummond was a Chicago Prairie School architect.-Early Years and Education:He was born in Newark, New Jersey, the son of carpenter and cabinet maker Eugene Drummond and his wife Ida Marietta Lozier...

, Francis Barry Byrne

Barry Byrne

Francis Barry Byrne was initially a member of the group of architects known as the Prairie School. After the demise of the Prairie School about 1914-16, Byrne continued as a successful architect by developing his own personal style.-Biography:Francis Barry Byrne was born and raised in Chicago...

, Walter Burley Griffin

Walter Burley Griffin

Walter Burley Griffin was an American architect and landscape architect, who is best known for his role in designing Canberra, Australia's capital city...

, Albert McArthur, Marion Mahony, Isabel Roberts

Isabel Roberts

Isabel Roberts was a Prairie School figure, member of the architectural design team in the Oak Park Studio of Frank Lloyd Wright and partner with Ida Annah Ryan in the Orlando, Florida architecture firm, “Ryan and Roberts”. It is fair to say that Roberts is an under-appreciated member of Wright’s...

 and George Willis

George Rodney Willis

George Rodney Willis, was an American architect associated with the Prairie School and the Oak Park, Illinois studio of Frank Lloyd Wright who thereafter had a successful career in California and in Texas....

 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!”

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

Great Depression

The Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression in the decade preceding World War II. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations, but in most countries it started in about 1929 and lasted until the late 1930s or early 1940s...

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

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 was in desperate financial and legal shape at the time and sold the McArthur Brothers the right to use his patents for the textile block system although he did not own them, causing considerable embarrassment to the McArthur family when the actual holder of the patents sued the Biltmore Corporation for patent infringement. Albert had married the daughter of a wealthy Jewish chocolatier while studying in Vienna; true to his lifelong anti-semitism Wright always referred to Albert's son as Jew-boy. Wright often underplayed the contributions of those who were associated with him and never gave credit. Upon seeing the completed hotel he remarked that "it had turned out as badly as he expected" and then spent the rest of his life trying to claim authorship for this project. 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."

He made similar dismissive remarks at Albert's home immediately after Albert's funeral, and Charles McArthur struck him in the face, knocking him down.
The design of the brick used to build the Arizona Biltmore is not a stylized palm tree inspired by FLW as sometimes claimed but Albert Chase McArthur's chop (stylized signature stamp), based on the logarithm of a B-flat minor. When Taliesin restored the Talleys after the 1971/2 fire they recast the bricks from the original molds, but put them in sideways and upside down. Mrs. Talley, thinking that this could be a FLW project, banned Albert Chase McArthur from the property and removed the original thousands of pieces of Warren McArthur furniture which had been a major visual part and asset of the hotel.
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.