Pioneer Information
Born in Decatur, Illinois, Alexander attended Phillips Exeter Academy and graduated from the University of Wisconsin in 1914. He received an M.L.A. from Harvard University in 1917, where he was awarded the Charles Eliot Traveling Fellowship. Likely postponed due to the onset of the first Word War, in 1921 the fellowship brought Alexander to Italy where, among other projects, he documented villa landscapes and their character-defining features at the Villa Donna Della Rosa, near Padua; Villa Torlonia and Villa Borghese at Frascati; and the Villa Collona and the American Academy in Rome.
Alexander served in the U.S. Air Corps as a lieutenant during World War I, and later settled in Cleveland. He began his career working for the landscape architecture firm of A.D. Taylor, before partnering with fellow Harvard alumnus William Strong in 1925, establishing the firm Alexander & Strong. Alexander served as Chief of Landscape Design for the Cleveland Parks Department until 1938. During this time, he also oversaw oversaw the Landscape Division’s, a sub-committee of Cleveland’s City Plan Commission, Civil Works administration-funded work producing plans and surveys of Cleveland’s parklands with Seward Mott and William Strong in the early 1930s, for which he specifically recommended improvements in Gordon and Rockefeller Parks.
During World War II, Alexander served as a Colonel on the Washington Staff of the CIA until his retirement. He became a Fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects in 1932 and served as President of the Ohio-Michigan Chapter in 1934 and 1935. Alexander died in Chatham, Massachusetts, at the age of 77.
