American-architect born in Cambridge, Massachusetts. William Robert Ware was the founder of the schools of architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge (1865) and Columbia University (then Columbia College) in New York (1881).
Besides his teaching activities, he co-directed two architectural firms: from 1860 Philbrick & Ware together with the civil engineer Edward S. Philbrick (1827–1889), and from 1863/64 to 1881, Ware & Van Brunt, with Henry Van Brunt (1832–1903), fel​low student at the atelier of Richard M. Hunt in New York City. The Boston architect and collector of stucco and glass windows Arthur Rotch (1850–1894), who was one of Ware’s students at the MIT from 1872 to 1873, was a trainee at Ware & Van Brunt.
In 1881, Ware moved from Boston to New York, where he became a trustee of The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1885. In the spring of 1890, he acquired various stucco and glass windows from art and antiquity dealers in Cairo, seventeen of which he donated in 1893 to The Metropolitan Museum of Art.