Russell Sturgis

Architect and architectural critic, born in Baltimore, Maryland, USA. He abandoned his architectural practice in 1880 after completing a series of buildings at Yale, and became the foremost architectural critic of his day. In periodicals, books, encyclopedia articles, and lectures, he championed Louis Sullivan and sparked a national awareness of art and architecture. His monumental History of Architecture (4 vols, 1906–15) was unfinished at his death.

Russell Sturgis, Ph.D. (October 16, 1836 - February 11, 1909), United States architect and art critic, was born in Baltimore County, Maryland.

He graduated from the Free Academy in New York (now the College of the City of New York) in 1856, and studied architecture under Leopold Eidlitz and then for two years in Munich. He was president of the Architectural League of New York in 1889-1893, was first president of the Fine Arts Federation in 1895-1897, and was a member of the National Society of Mural Painters, the National Sculpture Society, the National Academy of Design, and the New York chapter of the American Institute of Architects.

He lectured on art at Columbia University, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; He edited A Dictionary of Architecture and Building (3 vols, 1901-1902) with architect Charles Amos Cummings, and the English version of Wilhelm Luebke's Outlines of the History of Art (2 vols, 1904), and he wrote European Architecture (1896), How to Judge Architecture (1903), The Appreciation of Sculpture (1904), The Appreciation of Pictures (1905), A Study of the Artist's Way of Working in the Various Handicrafts and Arts of Design (2 vols, 1905), and an unfinished History of Architecture (1906 sqq.).