Adolf Cluss was the offspring of a Heilbronn family of master builders. In 1844 he left Heilbronn as a journeyman carpenter. His travels took him to Brussels where he met Karl Marx and joined the early communist movement. In 1848 he became secretary of the Mainz Workers’ Association.
In the summer of 1848 he left revolutionary Germany. In Washington D.C. he first worked as an engineer, then as an architect, cutting his ties with Karl Marx in 1858.
In the early 1860s he opened an architect’s office in Washington. When he stopped working in 1890 aged 65, he had designed the majority of governmental buildings in the U.S. capital. Several of them can still be admired today.