UC Berkeley

This dissertation examines the academic career of William Robert Ware (1832-1915), an American architect who became the leading architectural educator in the late nineteenth century. Previous accounts of Ware have focused either on his work as a practicing architect or his role as a department builder at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Columbia University, where he imported the Beaux-Arts system of design instruction to the United States. This dissertation, in contrast, interprets archival documents and nineteenth-century architectural theory to situate Ware in relation to a number of core questions and concepts in the broader history of architectural expertise, including the construction of professional authority, the meaning of culture, the use of judgment, and the tension between creative expression and information processing. In addressing these core questions and concepts as a pedagogue, Ware helped to embed architectural education within the institutional setting of the modern research university and—for a brief historicist moment near the turn of the century—transform the discipline from a useful art into a liberal art…