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Architect · Lincoln Bank Tower and the Fort Wayne skyline
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Alvin Max Strauss was born in 1895 at Kendallville, Indiana, to German immigrant parents, apprenticed with architects in Chicago and Fort Wayne, served in the Motor Transport Corps in the First World War, and founded his own Fort Wayne practice in 1918. His firm designed the face of the twentieth-century city: the Embassy Theatre and Indiana Hotel (1928); the Lincoln Bank Tower (1929–30), for which he was local architect with Walker and Weeks of Cleveland — at 312 feet, Indiana's tallest building until 1962; the Clyde Theatre; and the Allen County War Memorial Coliseum (1952). Beyond the city he designed the Art Deco showroom and administration buildings of the Auburn Cord Duesenberg facility (1930). He was president of the Fort Wayne Society of Architects and a director of the Indiana Society of Architects. He died in 1958, the year his firm reorganized as A. M. Strauss and Associates. His office's drawings — some 2,400 commissions — are preserved in the Drawings and Documents Archive at Ball State University.
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Sources: Ball State University, A. M. Strauss Architectural Records collection guide; Wikipedia, "Alvin M. Strauss" and "Lincoln Bank Tower."