Ralph Walker attended MIT in 1909-11. He worked in a number of architectural offices before settling in New York in 1916, where he joined the office of McKenzie, Voorhees, and Gmelin in 1919.
He became a partner in 1926, when the office became Voorhees, Gmelin & Walker. Walker designed expressive and vertically emphatic Art-Deco style skyscrapers in New York. His works include the Barclay-Vesey Telephone Building; the Western Union Building; the Irving Trust Building; the Bell Telephone Laboratories, Murray Hill, New Jersey; and buildings for the Worlds Fair of 1939 in New York. He was President of the American Institute of Architects in 1949-51, and received that Institutes Gold Medal in 1957.