Theatre Architects

Born: 1893 (Royal Center, Indiana)

Died: 1964 (Ootsburg, Wisconsin)

Russell Barr Williamson  was a prominent Milwaukee architect who practiced from the early 1920s into the later 1950s. After apprenticing with internationally known architect Frank Lloyd Wright in Chicago from 1914 to 1917, the Indiana-born Williamson established his own practice in Milwaukee.

Williamson’s architectural work in the 1920s was primarily a mix of prairie style residential designs true to the theories of Frank Lloyd Wright and Mediterranean Revival commercial buildings. The most outstanding surviving examples of his own particularly robust interpretation of the Mediterranean Revival mode are the Eagles Club and the Avalon Theater, both in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. There are considerable similarities in the design of the two structures which were conceived only a year apart and were under construction at the same time. Later in his career, Williamson designed in the modern style popular in the 1940s and 1950s.

Williamson was known as a residential architect but records of his commercial work are rare. Therefore, the Avalon Theater and the Eagles Club are among the most distinctive structures in the city from the 1920’s, taking Mediterranean design elements like tile roofs, Baroque twisted columns, arched openings, wrought iron, and tile but infusing them with fanciful elements like the giant figural frieze at the Eagles Club and the inventive foliate forms and almost Deco-like stepped forms on the Avalon façade that lend an aura of exoticism to the building. In recognition of its unique design the Eagles Club has been locally designated since 1989.

Information in part sourced from Donna Schlieman’s January 2004 Historic Designation Report on the Avalon Theater in Milwaukee, WI .

Theatres on this website in which this architect was involved:

Avalon Atmospheric Theater, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA