Ralph Adams Cram
In 1963, Ralph Adams Cram was born in Hampton Falls, New Hampshire to William Augustine Cram, a Unitarian minister, and Sarah Elizabeth Blake Cram. At only eighteen, Cram left home for Boston, to apprentice for five years with the architecture firm of Rotch and Tilden. During this time Cram published his designs in magazines and his art criticism in The Boston Evening Transcript. He went to work for The Boston Evening Transcript in 1886 and over the next few years made trips to Europe that shaped his career. Not only did the trips ultimately influence his style and studies, but it was on these trips that Cram befriended a Maryland architect, T. Henry Randall, who helped persuade Cram to return to practicing architecture.
In doing so, Cram established his own architecture practice in Boston with colleague Charles Francis Wentworth in 1889, Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue joined later that year as draftsman. In 1891, they received their first major commission from All Saints in Ashmont. In 1902, the firm then Cram, Goodhue & Ferguson opened an office in New York. All Saints was the first of many churches to be built in Cram's Gothic style that would ultimately, in 1907, earn Cram, Goodhue, & Ferguson the commission of Saint Thomas Church in New York. Cram also co-founded the Boston Society of the Arts and Crafts and the "Knight Errant" quarterly magazine, as well as publishing several books on architecture.
In 1900, he married Elisabeth "Bess" Carrington Read and took an extended honeymoon trip to Northern Italy. In 1901, he took his first commission in Virginia with Sweet Briar College whom he associated with through the 1920's. Shortly after relocating the firm to New York in 1902, they received a commission to design buildings at the United States Military Academy at West Point. In 1907, in addition to the prestigious Saint Thomas commission, Cram accepted the position of supervising architect with Princeton University – a position he held until 1929. And just prior to working with University of Richmond, he also became the chief architect at Rice University in Houston.
In 1910, President Boatwright and the trustees commissioned the firm of Cram, Goodhue & Ferguson to design the new campus for Richmond College and Westhampton College. Cram was already a very well-known architect and the "world’s most persuasive and passionate advocate for the Gothic style." By 1914, when Richmond College and Westhampton College began classes on the new west end campus, he had already received national acclaim for his work on Princeton University and West Point.
The Richmond College commission was slightly unique, however, involving 300 acres of suburban forestland. With Richmond and Westhampton, Cram "had a clean palette. Here, starting from scratch, he could express most purely the medievalism he believed so vehemently could ennoble American campuses, and by extension, future generations."
Cram told a group of Princeton alumni in 1908: "One of the essential elements of all education is that students feel themselves surrounded… by… definite law, from which there is, however, a way out into the broadest and highest freedom. This must absolutely be shown in the material form of the university."
In June of 1913, Cram spoke at the cornerstone laying on the new Richmond campus. He shared with students and faculty his vision for the campus, "What we are trying to do is to abandon all that is ephemeral and time-saving in architecture and go back to the perfect style that was developed by our own kin in the old home overseas, to express just these high and eternal ideals of education that were so calculated to breed high character, and did breed it, as history shows."
Ralph Adams Cram died in Boston in 1942.
-- excerpted from: "Ralph Adams Cram, The University of Richmond, and the Gothic Style Today" published by the Marsh Art Gallery, University of Richmond. 1997.