page_title: Adolf Cluss
section_title: Life
hierarchical_section_title: Adolf Cluss / Life
context_page_description: Adolf Ludwig Cluss also known as Adolph Cluss was a German-born American immigrant who became one of the most important, influential and prolific architects in Washington, D.C., in the late 19th century, responsible for the design of numerous schools and other notable public buildings in the capital. Today, several of his buildings are still standing. He was also a City Engineer and a Building Inspector for the Board of Public Works. He is believed to have been the only person to have met both Karl Marx and President Ulysses S. Grant.
  Red brick was Cluss' favorite building material; that, and his early communist sympathies, led some to dub him the "Red Architect", though he was a man who in later life became a confirmed Republican.
context_section_description: He was born on July 24, 1825, in Heilbronn in the Kingdom of Württemberg in south-west Germany. He was the fifth child of Johann Heinrich Abraham Cluss (1792-1857) and Anna Christine Neuz (1796-1827). His father was a master builder, and young Cluss set out as an itinerant carpenter when he left Heilbronn at age nineteen. In his travels, he met and became a friend of Karl Marx and a supporter of communist principles at a time of political and revolutionary ferment in Germany. He joined the Communist League and became a member of the Mainz Worker Council. The failure of the German revolutionary movement in 1848 led him to leave Germany when he was twenty-three, along with other Forty-Eighters who emigrated to the United States at that time. In the United States, he continued his political activity into the 1850s, maintaining an extensive correspondence with Marx and Engels and writing and publishing political articles for the German-American community.
caption: Adolf Cluss
  (ca. 1860)
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