FEBRUARY 2008 » book review

The Goth of Boston

The Architecture of Ralph Adams Cram and His Office
by Ethan Anthony
W.W. Norton & Company, New York; 2007
256 pp; 200 halftones; $60
ISBN 978-0-393-73104-0

By Eve M. Kahn

In the 1910s, as the architect Ralph Adams Cram (1863-1942) was reaching the midpoint of a busy 60-year career, he carved out time from his Boston practice to run the architecture department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Cram, best known for designing Gothic churches and campuses, steered MIT students toward more picturesque architectural styles, and away from the then-dominant symmetries of Beaux Arts or then-rising taste for industrial forms and materials.

He gave classes in church design at MIT, and for one campus ribbon-cutting ceremony, "Cram staged a medieval festival with 1,700 participants costumed in Arthurian garb," architect/historian Ethan Anthony writes in The Architecture of Ralph Adams Cram and His Office, the first full-blown Cram monograph. During the MIT festival, Anthony adds, Cram brought in barges to ferry local mayors and the state's governor across the Charles River, and the architect played master of ceremonies "dressed as Merlin the Magician."

Cram doesn't seem to have ever liked the present much. He deemed it decadent and morally decayed. "Modern culture was a travesty to Cram," Anthony states bluntly. The history of civilization, Cram wrote, amounted to "a farrago of cruelty, slaughter and injustice," and he railed against the popular, insidious Nietzschean belief that the artist should play "rebel against a constituted society, an abnormal phenomenon, feeding upon his inner self." Yet somehow this pessimistic curmudgeon supervised up to 60 loyal staffers and inventively dreamed up hundreds of buildings across the U.S. and as far afield as Canada, France and Japan.

He completed courthouses, libraries, statehouses, offices, universities, boarding schools, bridges, apartment blocks, mansions, war memorials and churches ranging from one-room rural chapels to urban cathedrals. His stylistic repertoire included not only his signature Gothic but also Byzantine, Romanesque, Norman, Tudor, Renaissance, Baroque, Shingle and Georgian.

Why has there been no major publication about him before? Partly because only a few of his masterpieces (including New York's Cathedral of St. John the Divine and Houston's Rice University) are intact and photogenic enough to tempt book publishers. The sheer variety of his output has also discouraged scholars from covering Cram, and his work is not terribly well documented, either. "The firm records are incomplete and all but one of the firm's job books are lost," notes Anthony, who is fortunately well situated enough to overcome the lack of paperwork. The author works for Cram's successor firm, now called HDB/Cram & Ferguson.

Anthony took a job at the Boston practice in 1991; octogenarians and nonagenarians dating back to the Cram years were still on staff. Anthony has interviewed them and many others in Cram's circle and pored through widely scattered archives. In the preface he mentions such rarefied, remote sources as "ruins, memories, doctoral theses, church bulletins … rectors, deacons, presbyters and members of Cram's churches" plus the dusty piled remains of Cram's own library "in his daughter's sugar house in Vermont."

Emerging from Anthony's determined research is a portrait of a workaholic with very few lukewarm opinions. Cram, the New Hampshire-born son of a cultured Unitarian minister turned farmer, grew up speaking French and German on the farm. By the time he apprenticed pro bono as a teenager to the Boston architecture firm of Rotch & Tilden, he had read the likes of "Emerson, Kant, Hegel, Spinoza, Matthew Arnold and John Ruskin," Anthony writes. In the late 1880s, shortly after founding his own firm, Cram became a devout Episcopalian. Religious buildings – as well as secular buildings that just look religious – could allow him "a means of resuscitating the moral foundations of society," Anthony notes. Cram's lofty goals won over clients ranging from insurance executives to the U.S. military – the architect's Gothic spires at West Point helped, as Anthony puts it, "to promote the medieval code of chivalry as a model of behavior for the American army."

Yet for all of Cram's "architectural language of ramparts, crenellations, and sally port," Anthony hastens to add, the architect never quite slavishly copied the past. In fact, he disdained that approach as trite and "conscientiously archaeological"; Cram instead set out to prove "that the spirit of medieval buildings could be evoked in original designs and that old forms could be recombined to suit contemporary purposes."

Cram had no qualms about adopting cloister forms into auto courts and he happily, though invisibly, specified his era's high tech. At a crenellated 1898 church in New Hampshire, he created a column-free lecture hall "with wrought-iron tension rods supporting the roof carefully concealed in faux wooden trusses." The office kept high tech out of sight even after the founder's death. Anthony writes that in the mid-1940s, the partners' Boston skyscraper for the John Hancock Life Insurance Company "mixes Art Deco with Mont-Saint-Michel."

Anthony devotes just 30 pages to Cram's biography and office history. The rest of the book contains some 130 mini-profiles – and I mean mini, some are as short as a caption – of built works and proposals. The designs appear chronologically in three categories (religious, academic and residential, institutional and commercial). A project list at the back names some 300 more Cram works, and usually, but not always, notes whether the realized examples survive.

The illustrations do not provide many more clues as to the fates of Cram buildings. The black-and-white images are mostly period façade drawings, rather grainily reproduced, or undated photos. Virtually no close-up shots appear, and it's particularly frustrating that there are no hints of the hues of the pervasive stained glass.

The author somewhat makes up for the visual lapses with lively aesthetic critiques. He points out which church massing has "power and dynamism," and which amounted to "an unsuccessful experiment with relative proportions." He chides owners who never raised enough funding to finish steeples, or commissioned "clumsy renovations and additions." Anthony shrewdly compares designs, too; he even knows where to find "Cram's only Roman interior" (in Jersey City, NJ) and "the only fan vaulting Cram ever employed" (in Newport, RI). The vivid, authoritative text may well make readers long for another edition stocked with recent color photography, showing palettes of sunrays spilling onto stone floors through arched windowpanes. TB

«BACK TO FEBRUARY 2008 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Have something to say about this article? Feel free to comment!

Comments feed