WILLCOX & JOHNSTON, architects of St. Paul., Minnesota, consisting of William H. Willcox (1832-1929) and Clarence Howard Johnston (1859-1936), are credited with the design of a significant landmark in Calgary, Alberta which is still standing today in 2023. In 1888 they were commissioned to prepare the plans for the Alberta Hotel, 8th Avenue S.W. at 1st Street S.W., CALGARY, ALTA. This 3 storey commercial block, clad entirely in Calgary sandstone, has recently been restored and is now a key work within the designated Calgary Heritage District. Despite the fact that there were already several professional architects living and working in Calgary during the period of 1885 to 1890, the commission was given to an American architectural firm located nearly 1,200 miles away. The local supervising architects in Calgary were McVittie, Child & Wilson.
Willcox was born in Brooklyn, N.Y. on 26 May 1832 and practiced there from 1853 to 1860 (Dennis S. Francis, Architects in Practice New York City 1840-1900, 1979, p. 98). He trained in Chicago with the legendary Dankmar Adler in 1871-79, and later moved to Nebraska and received the prize commission to design the State Capitol Building in Lincoln in 1879; built 1879-82 (Henry Russell Hitchcock, Temples of Democracy: The State Capitols of the U.S.A., 1976, 272, descript.). This early work by Willcox stood until 1920 when it was demolished and replaced by a new Capitol building by Bertram Goodhue. Willcox then moved to St. Paul, Minn. in 1882 and formed a partnership with Clarence Johnston. Together, their only project in Canada appears to be the design for the Alberta Hotel. Willcox moved to Seattle in 1891, then relocated to Los Angeles (in 1895-98), and moved once again to San Francisco. He died in California in February 1929 (biographies of William H. Wilcox were published in H. Withey, Biographical Dictionary of American Architects, 1956, 326, and in Alan Lathrop, Minnesota Architects: A Biographical Dictionary, 2010, 228-29; and in Jeffrey K. Ochsner, Shaping Seattle Architecture, 2014, 485-86).
Clarence Johnston, more than a full generation younger than Willcox, was born on 28 August 1859 in Waseca County, Minn. and trained in the office of Abraham Radcliffe, a leading architect in St. Paul. He studied architecture at M.I.T. in Boston, but did not graduate, and later accepted a position as a young assistant with Herter Bros. Architects in New York in 1880-82, then returned to St. Paul and later formed a partnership with Willcox in 1885. They ended their collaboration in 1889, and Johnston continued to work under his own name. He later died in St. Paul, Minn. on 31 December 1936. A biography of Clarence Johnston, with a dated list of works, can be found in Alan Lathrop, Minnesota Architects: A Biographical Dictionary, 2010, 116-17.
(with McVittie, Child & Wilson, Local Supervising architects) CALGARY, ALTA., The Alberta Hotel, 8th Avenue S.W. at 1st Street S.W., designed 1887; built 1887-89; later addition to the hotel 1904 by G.M. Lang; all still standing in 2023 (Calgary Tribune, 18 March 1887, 8, referring to the hotel plans prepared by "....an American architect"; inf. City of Calgary, Heritage Planning Dept., inf. Alberta Register of Historic Properties, Designation Statement, detailed descrip. (online)