Cluss,Adolf b. July 14, 1825; Heilbronn am Neckar, Wurttemberg d.July 24, 1905;Washington, D.C.
One of the leading architects, engineers, and city planners in nineteenth-century Washington, D.C., Adolf Cluss was also a social reformer and journalist. He fled Germany for the United States after taking part in the failed revolution of 1848.
Cluss was born into a family of wealthy craftspeople and winegrowers. He attended school in Heilbronn and became a carpenter. In 1846, he was employed in Mainz as “second architect” at the Hessische Lud- wigsbahn, Rhine-Hessen’s first railroad. In Mainz, Cluss was involved in the Turner movement and organized the Arbeiterbil- dungsverein (Workers Educational Organization), which offered workers free classes and access to Socialist literature. He also contributed to Der Democrat, the weekly journal of the Arbeiterbildungsverein, and was one of three delegates from Mainz to the convention of the Frankfurt Parliament in 1848. Cluss had met Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in 1847 and stayed in touch with them for many years, exchanging letters on an almost weekly basis. Until the failed revolution of 1848 forced Cluss to emigrate, he was a regular contributor (under the pseudonym of C. Lange) to the Deutsche Brussler Zeitung (German Brussels Newspaper), a Communist biweekly newspaper that informed German refugees about democratic activities in Europe.After arriving in the United States in September 1848, Cluss spent several months in New York City before his interest in politics brought him to Washington, D.C. His skills secured him employment with the U.S. Coastal Survey, and while stationed at the Washington Navy Yard, he attended sessions of the nearby U.S. Congress. Cluss lobbied for better working conditions in the Navy Yard. At the same time, he joined the leftliberal Washington Turn-Verein (Turner Association) and got involved with publishing its journal, the Turn-Zeitung (Turner Gazette); he also contributed numerous articles to political organs including the London People's Paper and the New York journal Die Reform (The Reform).
The second half of the 1850s was a turning point in Cluss’s life. In 1855 he became an American citizen, and that year he joined the Treasury Department as a draftsman, which started his career as an official architect in the U.S. capital. Cluss married Rosa Schmidt, a fellow immigrant from his hometown, on February 8, 1859. His conflicts with other members of the German emigre community further contributed to his transformation from a German activist and social reformer to an architect who attempted to realize his reformist ideas through building, engineering, and urban planning.
In 1862 Cluss started his own architecture firm with Wilderich von Kammer- hueber, another German immigrant. Although some of the early commissions were for the military, the office also designed the first public school building in Washington, D.C., the Wallach School.
Over the years, Cluss contributed as an innovative engineer and architect to Washington’s system of free public schools, which would be unsurpassed in the nation. The excellence of his work was recognized in the United States and abroad. Cluss was awarded a Medal for Progress in education and school architecture at the World’s Exposition in Vienna in 1873 for his design of Franklin School. His school designs also won prizes at international expositions in Philadelphia (1876), Paris (1878), and New Orleans (1884). Cluss’s schools, which included many engineering innovations such as modern heating systems and light-filled classrooms, were seen as both functional and attractive and influenced architects into the early twentieth century.
As chief engineer of the Board of Public Works in the District of Columbia (since 1872), Cluss designed a modern sewer system and implemented comprehensive plans for a modernization of the city’s gas and water infrastructure. He also pursued the “parking” of Washington’s streets by narrowing roadways and planting trees and grass along wide avenues.
Among Cluss’s many projects were eight churches with characteristic splitlevel plans (with classrooms on the ground level) and three major markets (Alexandria City Hall and Market House, Center Market, and Eastern Market).
In the 1880s, Adolf Cluss established himself as one of the most experienced and innovative museum architects in the United States. His designs included the Army Medical Museum, extensive exhibition spaces in the Agriculture and Patent Office buildings, and the reconstruction of the Smithsonian “castle.” His architectural masterpiece was the National Museum (today the Arts and Industries Building) on the National Mall. It opened to the public in 1881 and was designed in a modernized Romanesque style that featured a red brick faqade enlivened by colored glazed bricks that were meant to resemble woven cloth, perhaps inspired by Gottfried Semper’s theory of textile as the original wall material.There can be no doubt that Cluss’s influence on Washington, D.C., architecture was decisive in the period after the Civil War, when the U.S. capital redefined itself and grew from a seat of government to a major national city. Shortly before Cluss’s death, changing architectural tastes and new technological demands led to the replacement of most of his buildings. Cluss’s signature Victorian red brick architecture gave way to a neoclassicism where marble and limestone were dominant. However, his impact is still visible today in the schools and row houses on Capitol Hill, as well as his designs on the National Mall.
Christof Mauch
See also Landscape Architects, German American
References and Further Reading
Beauchamp, Tanya Edward. “Adolph Cluss: An Architect in Washington during the Civil War and Reconstruction.” Records of the Columbia Historical Society 48 (1971-1972).
Lessoff, Alan, and Christof Mauch, eds. Adolf Cluss, Architect: From Germany to America. New York: Berghahn Books, 2005.