William Robert Ware

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William Robert Ware (27 May 1832 - 9 June 1915), born in Cambridge, Massachusetts into a family of the Unitarian clergy, was an American architect.

He received his professional education at Harvard College and Harvard's Lawrence Scientific School. He is credited with designing the High Street Church in Brookline, Massachusetts while at the first firm he partnered, Philbrick and Ware, and Harvard's Memorial and Weld Halls, the Episcopal Divinity School campus at Harvard University, and the Ether Monument at the Boston Public Garden while at the second firm he partnered, Ware and Van Brunt.

In 1865, Ware became the first professor of architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1881 he moved to New York City and founded the School of Architecture at Columbia University, which began as the Architecture Department in the Columbia School of Mines. He retired in 1903.

Ware dabbled briefly in voting systems and used the idea of the single transferable vote to devise instant-runoff voting(or as it is better known outside the U.S. the alternative vote) around 1870, which is used in several English speaking countries.