Ralph Adams Cram was an outstanding American architect. He was known for his collegiate and ecclesiastical buildings. An adherent of the Gothic Revival style, he became its foremost figure in American architecture during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
One of his supreme projects is the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in New York City.
Cram also wrote on architecture and society, including a volume of horror stories.
Background
Ralph Adams Cram was born on December 16, 1863, in Hampton Falls, New Hampshire, United States. He was a son of William Augustine Cram, a Unitarian clergyman, and Sarah Elizabeth Cram (maiden name Blake).
He was named after an essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson and a second president of the United States John Adams. He had a sister Marion Blake and a brother William Everett.
As a teenager, he was interested in both art and architecture. The passion was fostered by his parents, who presented him with C. J. Richardson’s House Building. This book, together with John Ruskin’s ‘The Seven Lamps of Architecture’ and ‘The Stones of Venice’, inspired Cram to pursue architecture as a career.
Education
Ralph Adams Cram received his early training in Augusta, Main, at Exeter High School in New Hampshire and at Westford Academy in Massachusetts which he entered in 1875.
Six years later, Cram became an apprentice at the architectural firm in Boston called ‘Rotch and Tilden’. Cram spent there five years.
In 1910, he received a Doctor of Letters degree from Princeton University. Five years later, he graduated from Yale University with a Doctor of Laws degree.
While in an apprenticeship with ‘Rotch and Tilden’, Ralph Adams Cram submitted many letters to the Boston ‘Transcript’ on art and architectural matters, and in 1886 E. H. Clement, the newspaper’s editor, offered him the position of an art critic. Cram accepted and spent several years as a journalist with the ‘Transcript’, although he continued to enter competitions and to submit plans for proposed building projects.
During this time, Cram was involved in the artistic circle of the city through various informal clubs and associations which gathered writers, poets, painters, and architects. With one of his acquaintances, Charles Wentworth, Cram opened in 1889 an architectural office called at first ‘Cram and Wentworth’.
Two years later, impressed by their common project of Episcopalian All Saints Church in Boston, an architect Bertram Goodhue joined the firm which changed its name to ‘Cram, Wentworth, & Goodhue’. Seeking an area of specialization. Cram identified church building as a promising option and eventually became renowned for ecclesiastical architecture, particularly in the Gothic mode.
After the early death of Charles Wentworth in 1897, a new partner came to the firm. It was a draftsman Frank Ferguson. The partnership now called ‘Cram, Goodhue & Ferguson’ obtained national acclaim due to a couple of projects, including the design of the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1902 and the Gothic Revival Saint Thomas Church on Manhattan's Fifth Avenue in New York City. The latter became the last common project for Cram and Goodhue who withdrew the company on August 14, 1913, to establish his own business. One more distinguished project of the partnership became the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine transformed by Cram and Ferguson to a late Gothic building.
In 1907, Cram joined the staff of Princeton University where he had occupied the post of consulting architect specially created for him by the University President Woodrow Wilson for twenty-two years. Later, he also rendered the same service to Bryn Mawr, Mount Holyoke, and Wellesley Colleges. Seven years after the assignment, Cram was appointed a chairperson of Boston’s newly established City Planning Board, one of the first such attempts on the part of a municipal government to address urban blight and ensure orderly city growth. He held the post until 1922. Also in 1914, he was made a head of the department of architecture at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, remaining there until 1921. Cram left both positions in part because funding became widely available for architectural commissions when World War I ended.
Throughout the 1920s, Ralph Adams Cram designed numerous buildings, in a range of architectural styles that included Byzantine, Mexican-Spanish Renaissance, colonial, and Italian Renaissance, as well as his trademark Gothic. Mention should also be made of his work in designing War Memorials, outstanding examples of which were built in France at Belleau Woods and Fere-en-Tardenois.
By the 1930s the work of Cram’s architectural firm was handled primarily by associates, including Frank Cleveland, Chester Godfrey, and Alexander Hoyle, while Cram practically retired and devoted an increasing amount of time to lecturing and writing. He spoke and published extensively on social, political, and religious as well as architectural matters. In addition, he authored several fiction and horror stories collected in ‘Black Spirits and White’.
The architect spent most of his time at Whitehall, estate at Sudbury, Massachusetts, where he had built a thirteenth century Chapel close to his home.
Among his last great architectural works were Saint George's Chapel in collaboration with John Nicolas Brown, the 1931 plan for the Cathedral, the Desloge Chapel in Saint Louis Missouri in 1932 and the 1938 Monastery for the Cowley-Fathers next to Harvard Yard and the Campus for Boston University.
Ralph Adams Cram is regarded as one of the most prominent architects in America of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Among the many landmarks of great distinction which he designed, the United States Military Academy at West Point and the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in New York City occupy the place of the most outstanding projects. In 1983, Cram’s Desloge Chapel in Saint Louis was included in the list of landmarks by the Missouri Historical Society.
Passionate about Gothic Revival style, he believed that the building should transmit spiritual values as a counter to technological civilization. So, he designed many educational buildings in the Gothic manner making the style standard for the American educational institutions of the time.
As a prolific author and writer, Ralph Adams Cram created a great number of essays and books on aesthetics and architecture, including ‘Church Building’ and ‘The Substance of Gothic’ among others. Cram’s ghost stories were highly regarded by genre enthusiasts although there is little known about the opinion of professional critics.
The Episcopal Church of the United States celebrates the contributions of Ralph Adams Cram, Richard Upjohn, and John La Farge to church architecture on a special feast day, December 16.
Ralph Adams Cram became an ardent Anglo-Catholic after an educational trip to Rome, Italy in 1887.
Politics
Some of Ralph Adams Cram’s most searing indictments of modern society were expressed in his books 'Convictions and Controversies' and 'The End of Democracy'. In 'The End of Democracy', Cram presented a negative assessment of the democratic government of the United States and maintained that the Constitution’s framers intended to establish a type of constitutional monarchy. In accordance with this theory, Cram proposed restricting presidential voting to the members of an elite governing body and suggested that the Presidency should be a lifetime appointment, carrying the title of 'Regent' or even 'King'.
Views
Ralph Adams Cram advocated the social, religious, and artistic ideals of the Middle Ages and condemned all aspects of modern life.
Theorizing that history runs in approximately five-hundred-year cycles, he maintained that the years between 1000 and 1500 were the most nearly perfect period of Western history, assessing the Middle Ages as a cultural millennium. Cram condemned most modern American art and architecture, as well as contemporary social and political forms and processes, as decadent, vulgar, and corrupt. Attributing this decadence to the decreased importance of religion and community to most Americans, Cram advocated a feudal way of life that included a rigidly stratified patriarchal social order centered on a sacramental church. For example, in Walled Towns, Cram propounded a return to the closed, insular communities of the Middle Ages.
Quotations:
"But freedom, liberty, is an attribute of the soul and it may exist even when the body is in bondage."
"The pursuit of perfection always implies a definite aristocracy, which is as much a goal of effort as a noble philosophy, an august civil polity or a great art."
"In revolt against this new and very evil thing came the republicanism of the eighteenth century, inspired and directed in large measure by members of the fast perishing aristocracy of race, character and tradition."
"True as this is, it is also true that for one who won through there were many who gained nothing, and it was, and is, the sheer weight of numbers of those who failed of this that has made their influence on the modern life as pervasive and controlling as it is."
"Christianity, democracy, science, education, wealth, and the cumulative inheritance of a thousand years, have not preserved us from the vain repetition of history."
"The Great War was a progressive revelation and disillusionment."
"Through the wholesale destruction of the representatives of a class that from the beginning of history had been the directing and creative force in civilization, a process began which was almost mechanical."
Membership
Associate Academician
National Academy of Design
,
United States
1938
National Institute of Arts and Letters
,
United States
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
,
United States
Mediæval Academy America
,
United States
Boston Society of Architects
,
United States
American Institute of Architects
,
United States
Visionists
,
United States
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
"One of the most prominent Episcopalian laymen in the country." The New York Times
"A keen, clear narrator; when he wishes for the sake of contrasting effect to introduce a bit of description, we find all the old charm of word-painting, but never at the crucial moment does he wander in this way from the subject." Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue, architect
Interests
Writers
John Ruskin
Connections
Ralph Adams Cram married Elizabeth Carrington Read in 1900. She was a daughter of Clement Carrington Read, a Confederate Army captain at the American Civil War.
The family produced three children named Mary Carrington, Ralph Wentworth and Elizabeth Strudwick.
