Overview

Following in the footsteps of Boston Bohemia, 1881-1900, Douglass Shand-Tucci's widely praised portrait of Ralph Adams Cram's early years, this volume tells the story of Cram's later career as one of America's leading cultural figures and most accomplished architects. With his partner Bertram Goodhue, Cram won a number of important commissions, beginning with the West Point competition in 1903. Although an increasingly bitter rivalry with Goodhue would lead to the dissolution of their partnership in 1912, Cram had already begun to strike out on his own. Supervising architect at Princeton, consulting architect at Wellesley, and head of the MIT School of Architecture, he would also design most of New York's Cathedral of St. John the Divine and the campus of Rice University, as well as important church and collegiate structures throughout the country. By the 1920s Cram had become a household name, even appearing on the cover of Time magazine. A complex man, Cram was a leading figure in what Shand-Tucci calls a full-fledged homosexual monastery in England, while at the same time married to Elizabeth Read. Their relationship was a complicated one, the effect of which on his children and his career is explored fully in this book. So too is his work as a religious leader and social theorist. Shand-Tucci traces the influence on Cram of such disparate figures as Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Phillips Brooks, Henry Adams, and Ayn Rand. He divides Cram's career into four lifelong quests : medieval, modernist, American, and ecumenical. Some quests may have failed, but in each he left a considerable legacy, ultimately transforming the visual image of American Christianity in the twentieth century. Handsomely illustrated with over 130 photographs and drawings and eight pages of color plates, Ralph Adams Cram can be read on its own or in conjunction with Boston Bohemia, 1881-1900. Together, the two volumes complete what the Christian Century has described as a superbly researched and captivating biography.

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9781558494893

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Reviews

Shand-Tucci's impressive and rewarding study, of which, to be accurate, architecture is really only one part, brings to light these many aspects of the architect's life, his professional milieu, and, more generally, the mixed motivations of American culture in the first half of the twentieth century.--Register of the Kentucky Historical Society Completes the author's long study of the seminal American neo-Gothic architect and stands as the most complete source on his work. It provides a wealth of detail and background information that will help scholars for generations to understand Cram's work and importance in twentieth-century American Architecture.--Journal of Society of Architectural Historians

Author Information

Douglass Shand-Tucci is a historian of American art and architecture and Boston/New England studies. Among his works are The Crimson Letter: Harvard, Homosexuality, and the Shaping of American Culture (2003), Harvard University: An Architectural Tour (2001), Built in Boston: City and Suburb, 1800-2000 (revised edition 2000), and The Art of Scandal: The Life and Times of Isabella Stewart Gardner (1997).

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