APRIL 2006 » book review

Four Quests

Ralph Adams Cram: An Architect's Four Quests – Medieval, Modernist, American, Ecumenicaln
by Douglass Shand-Tucci
University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst, MA; 2005
640 pp.; hardcover; 8 color & 139 b&w illus.; $49.95
ISBN 1-55849-489-8

Reviewed by Ethan Anthony

Ralph Adams Cram was born in 1863 in the middle of the Civil War; he died in 1942 in the middle of the Second World War, and the First World War and the depression dominated much of the middle of his life. His lifetime saw the creation of the American middle class and the rise of Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell and Henry Ford. It was an era of big ideas, big corporate success and big fortunes and Cram devoted himself to the making of extraordinarily detailed, rich and above all expensive buildings that put many a great fortune to the test.

Cram, though born in New Hampshire, spent most of his youth in the farm town of Westford, MA, where his father, (who had been jailed briefly for his conscientious objection to the Civil War) was the Unitarian minister. Summer holidays on the Hampton Falls, NH, subsistence farm, seat of the Cram family from the 1630s, filled the young Cram with a fierce independence that was tempered with the understanding that to be able to fight one had stay in the fight.

Upon graduation from public high school in Hampton, NH, Cram was apprenticed by his father to an architect in Boston. After five years in what he characterized as a "rotten office," Cram quit his unpaid apprenticeship and dreamed of opening an office, though he lacked money and commissions that would sustain it. He realized that to lead an architectural practice it was necessary to travel and to experience European architecture, so to earn money for these travels Cram began submitting entries to architectural competitions. Wins of two successive public competitions brought him substantial cash prizes he employed to finance two European tours where he first saw the buildings that would become inspiration for his further work.

Returning to Boston, Cram had no capital and had accumulated substantial debts to his parents. Undeterred by his lack of resources he allied himself with the descendent of a Boston family of means, Charles Francis Wentworth, and together they opened an office in 1889.

It is at this point that the first volume of Douglass Shand-Tucci's biography of Cram, Boston Bohemia, begins and then in four pages covers all of the work to 1903. In this second and equally flawed 500-plus-page-long volume, Shand-Tucci dismisses all of Cram and Goodhue's early work in his preface, starting the book with the win of the West Point competition. As a result, we miss the raison d'etre of much of the work and the relationships from which flowed its early successes. Reading the first volume is little help since it does not fully treat Cram's early architecture, glossing through a few residential works to concentrate instead on a lengthy account of every Bostonian of the era whom Cram might or could have known.

Shand-Tucci began his interest in the Ralph Adams Cram story in the writing of the Parish History of his beloved home church, All Saints Ashmont, Dorchester, Boston, A Centennial History of the Parish, published by the parish in 1975. Also that year, he produced a brief biography entitled Ralph Adams Cram, American Medievalist, published by the Boston Public Library in conjunction with the library's Cram exhibit, which Shand-Tucci curated. He has given numerous talks on Cram, developing his original interest in one Cram church into a small cottage industry.

It may be that his lack of an architectural or architectural history background has naturally caused him to produce what might be more correctly termed the gossip columnist's view of Cram. That might not be so bad were it not for the fact that throughout the book we feel that because he has to strain so hard for proof to support his conclusions we can not entirely trust his interpretation of events. Too often we read that because so and so must, could or should have known Cram ipso facto Cram must have had a similar world view or, harder yet to believe, sexual orientation. One example is Shand-Tucci's mischaracterization of a letter from Cram's nephew, Clement Read Strudwick, as implying some intimacy between them, yet lacking knowledge of their relatedness, a grievous error for a historian though less so for a gossip columnist.

Shand-Tucci does glancingly refer to the 1891 win of the commission to design a new church in Dorchester financed by one of the wealthiest New England families, the Peabody family. It was important because Cram was also joined at that point by the young draftsman Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue. The church, All Saints' Ashmont, was a great success with the Episcopal churchgoers and more commissions for churches followed. Goodhue was thus made a partner, (according to Cram's 1936 autobiography, My Life in Architecture) in 1895. The death of Wentworth in 1899 opened the way for the Frank Ferguson, the first engineer partner, to join the firm.

Though everything was in place, business could be slow and it was just such a time three years later when a letter arrived asking the firm to participate in the competition to design the expansion of the American Military Academy at West Point. A year later the firm won the competition making them instantly the most famous architectural firm in the country. From that day forward the office produced Gothic churches and academic buildings and eventually a veritable flood of some 750 commissions including highly competent Georgian and Classical buildings for colleges, universities and preparatory high schools. Their clients were the elite of American society including Andrew W. Mellon, President William H. Taft, Woodrow Wilson, Edward Doheny and John D. Rockefeller, as well as church building committees in 44 states, Cuba, France and Canada. Cram also designed the monument commemorating the founding of the Republican Party in Jackson, MI.

But these benchmarks of his extraordinary success merely mark out the boundaries of Cram's professional achievements. They tell us little of the person who was Ralph Adams Cram. Biography at best should be more than a listing of events; we hope it will be a window into the life. Shand-Tucci's massive volumes, though, are more history of the place and people among which Cram lived. After several hours reading through Shand-Tucci's conclusions I found myself hungering to learn something about Cram the man. What was he really like? What is there we can learn that will benefit us today? There is little of that sort of knowledge to be found in this book. Instead, we must endure lengthy side tracks on obscure figures in controversies no longer of interest to anyone.

As is true of many public figures, Cram had a public persona built of small encounters, criticism and rumor that was far removed from the private reality he, his family and the office jealously guarded. To develop a picture of Cram, it is necessary to pile up small bits of evidence, and the danger in such deductive development is that the compiler may become selective in which bits of evidence make their way into the account. This it seems to me is the problem with the Shand-Tucci work. He has come around through 40 years of on and off study of his subject to a fixed point of view. Never mind that the evidence to support it is scant and subject to many interpretations. The result is that the man can not be seen through the conclusions and knowing interpretations of the writer.

Much is known about Cram and his way of working. Cram always interviewed the client and visited the site. To do so he would often travel two or three days by train in each direction. He was frequently away from the office for a week at a time or more. Often, he would draw thumbnail sketches of the site, plan, elevation and a perspective of the building as he sat with the client or in the train.

When he had gathered the information and was at last back in his office, he sat alone in his private office and drafted out the basic form of the building using a parallel bad and triangles on thick brown paper. The schematic sketch was then handed off to one of his partners who functioned as executive architect supervising a team of draftsmen. A small set including plans, elevations and sections were done for pricing, which was often based on the cubic feet enclosed by the building. During construction, as details became necessary, often hundreds of large-scale drawings were done (many at full size) of the details necessary to describe a Gothic building to the contractors and artisans who brought it into being mostly with handcrafts. Shand-Tucci touches on this process glancingly in his description of the Swedenborgian church in Bryn Athyn, PA, but we could do with a far more full description of the process.

Drafting these buildings required draftsmen of superior artistic talent far removed from anything today's architects are capable of. The talent of the artist was as critical as technical proficiency and this accorded with Cram's philosophy. He was one of the first Arts and Crafts architects in the United States and his work was a perfect combination of art in the office with craft in the field. For Cram, building without art lacked the ability to express the divine in humanity.

Shand-Tucci goes to some lengths to advance the theory that Cram, though he repeatedly and clearly pronounced his profound distaste for modernism in art and in architecture, was actually a closet Modernist. As evidence of this we are offered the pronouncement that Cram's Calvary Church in Pittsburgh, PA, arguably Cram's most purely English Gothic production is "modern." Calvary is certainly anything but modern. Cram said in a letter to his mother of Calvary, "it is the most perfect thing we have ever done or will do." In saying so he was congratulating himself on achieving exactly what he had set out to do: the rebirth of the form of the English monastic church as it had been when Henry VIII destroyed the Catholic Church in England.

In his later years, Cram watched in anguish as Modernism began to supersede his tradition-based and contextual architecture. He wrote that the change in art and architecture mirrored the decline of the entire civilization. The misuse of the power of industrialization, the corruption of democracy by corrupt politicians and war were the result of the decline of religion and morality. Modernism in art and architecture was one of the symptoms of the general decadence. As his health gradually declined, his successors in his own office began to produce Art Deco and the stripped Classicism of the 1930s, and industrialization began to take the place of handwork in architecture as it had in the factory.

This must have been very difficult for Cram who was unrelenting in his criticism of modern art, calling Gaudi irrational and Frank Lloyd Wright irresponsible and offering withering criticisms of democracy in response to Louis Sullivan's glowing romantic view of American democracy as a raison d'etre for an American architecture. In fact, Cram fought the Modernists with their emphasis on progress with every fiber of his being. At a time when urban renewalists would have demolished the architectural heritage of the country he fought for preservation.

His distrust of his contemporary architects and of architectural critics was shared by his contemporary Wright. Cram is characterized by Shand-Tucci as an integral part of the Brahmin center, yet he never forgot his heritage and his own history. He and several of his most important partners descended from the very families (Cram, Godfrey, Cleveland and Brown) who had been banished to New Hampshire in 1638 by Governor John Winthrop and the Puritan predecessors of the Boston Brahmin establishment in the Anne Hutchinson controversy. The firm controlled to the end of Cram's time by the men from Hampton Falls achieved a complete and phenomenal triumph dominating a town that seems still unaware of their origins.

It is surprising given his acceptance at Princeton and 55 other schools and colleges, and his 1912 appointment to honorary membership by the Harvard chapter of the Phi Beta Kappa Society that he never succeeded in penetrating Harvard University architecturally. The closest he came was through the patronage of Isabella Stuart Gardner with his Cowley chapel in Cambridge, MA, succeeding through her auspices in overcoming the behind-the-scenes connivances of Harvard University President Charles Elliott who found his work too Catholic. This amateurish and biased biography of Cram in its abortive attempt to portray him as a closet homosexual, regrettably misses much of this sort of real drama from the dynamic architectural battlefield that was his life. Cram has been called cranky, difficult and egotistical on the one hand, and gentle, creative, thoughtful and intellectual on the other. Shand-Tucci alone has portrayed him as a furtive, conflicted figure leading a hidden double life he would have been at great lengths to conceal from view of a society that would have condemned him. This is at variance with Cram's in-your-face rebelliousness and capacity for taking heat that has become legend.

All other accounts have recognized a deliberate, moral, sharp and tough thinker who in the midst of a battle never hesitated to take up the flag and charge forward in the direction of the enemy. As another hyphenated historian Henry-Russell Hitchcock pointed out, the Cram office was one of the first of the distinctly American genre of corporate practices and the office jealously guarded and fostered his legend.

Today, the revival of arts and crafts in building, whether it be in preservation, restoration or in new traditional architecture would comfort Ralph Adams Cram. His principles are in the ascendancy once more as their fundamental truth continues to be sound and to be attractive. His books are being re-published, many of his buildings have been restored and with a few notable exceptions they are now viewed with a new respect. Rather than this confused attempt to remake Cram in the image of the modern man, we today can still know him easily by visiting his buildings and reading his books and observing the impact his work has on us. TB

Ethan Anthony, AIA, is the president of HDB/Cram and Ferguson Inc. in Boston, MA, the firm that was founded in 1889 by Ralph Adams Cram and has been in continuous practice since that time. Anthony is the author of The Architecture of Ralph Adams Cram and his Office, which will be released by W.W. Norton in September 2006.

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