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Ethan Anthony, the Architecture of Ralph Adams Cram and His Office

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Ethan Anthony, the Architecture of Ralph Adams Cram and His Office University of Southern Maine USM Digital Commons History College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences Winter 2010 Review of: Ethan Anthony, The Architecture of Ralph Adams Cram and His Office Libby MacDonald Bischof University of Southern Maine, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.usm.maine.edu/history Part of the History Commons Recommended Citation Bischof, Libby. "The Architecture of Ralph Adams Cram and His Office." Winterthur Portfolio 44, no. 4 (2010): 395-396. This Book Review is brought to you for free and open access by the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at USM Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in History by an authorized administrator of USM Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Book Reviews 395 preference for depicting single, isolated features in twentieth-century American architect and champion a landscape: the embankment running between the of Gothic revival, Ralph Adams Cram (1863–1942). train and the viewer seems to suggest that the rail- Rather, it is a visual celebration and overview of the way separates people rather than brings [sic] them evolution of the key works of Cram and his firm’sdi- together” (212). verse architectural portfolio over the course of nearly Although Kennedy and Treuherz have collected seven decades. In this volume Anthony, the current an impressively broad range of images, their choices president of HDB/Cram and Ferguson, Inc. (the suc- often seem arbitrary, dictated by the availability of cessor to the firm Cram founded in 1889), organizes an object for loan or the limits of their knowledge. the work of Cram’s office into three categories: re- They seem most comfortable on British and French ligious architecture, academic architecture, and a materials, but, as an Americanist, I wonder, why Cole “catch-all” grouping of residential, institutional, and Inness but not Thomas Eakins’s Max Schmitt in and commercial architecture. Within these sub- a Single Scull (1871, Metropolitan Museum of Art, sections the firm’s work is laid out roughly chrono- New York) or George Bellows’s Pennsylvania Station logically, an organizational structure aided greatly Excavation (1909, Brooklyn Museum)? The bibliog- by a comprehensive and detailed “Project List” of raphy at the end of the volume suggests one plausi- the firm’s commissions from 1882 to 1943 that ap- ble answer: the authors found their way to Leo Marx’s pears near the end of the volume (241–48). classic, The Machine in the Garden (1964), but did Anthony’s work is best described as a catalog. not make similar use of any major treatment of late The bulk of the book consists of 200 full- and half- nineteenth- or early twentieth-century American page black-and-white illustrations of plans, artist ren- art.1 derings, and photographs of completed projects, Still, the most fundamental weakness of the book accompanied by the author’s helpful (though overly is analytical: Kennedy and Treuherz amassed a vast brief) captions, summaries, and explanations of high- range of materials, but the breadth of materials they lighted projects. As such, he devotes only minimal found seems to have swamped their ability to inter- attention to biographical information about Cram’s pret them. In their eagerness to show that each ob- interesting and often complex personal and profes- ject in one of their groupings expresses the often sional life in Boston and beyond. Although Anthony rather baggy theme unifying the grouping, both pri- makes clear in his preface that his project is more mary authors essentially ignore ways in which various about the work of Cram’sfirm(andlessabout works express different attitudes toward the railway Cram’s life beyond his architecture), in order to and the larger industrial and social processes that fully contextualize and introduce Cram to readers the railway was used to epitomize. Despite or, per- and admirers of his architectural work, a more de- haps, because of the wide range of materials they tailed biographical section than the one included consider, the authors consistently conflate differ- would have been most welcome. Readers who desire ences, making works in different media made in dif- more information on Cram’s life will do well to con- ferent countries at different times and aimed at sult his own informative 1936 autobiography, My different kinds of audiences seem fundamentally Life in Architecture, while readers curious about alike. Cram’s more Bohemian past in fin de siècle Boston, as well as his numerous poetic and literary endeavors, Kenneth John Myers will want to peruse Douglass Shand-Tucci’s 1995 Detroit Institute of Arts Ralph Adams Cram: Life and Architecture.1 What Ethan Anthony. The Architecture of Ralph Adams 1 In his preface, Anthony clearly articulates a significant separa- Cram and His Office.NewYork:W.W.Norton, tion between his own ten years of research for TheArchitectureof 2007. 200 black-and-white illustrations, project list, Ralph Adams Cram and His Office and Shand-Tucci’s many decades 60 00 of work on Cram. Anthony notes, “Shand-Tucci advanced the theory bibliography, index. $ . that Cram and many of his associates were closeted gays and that much of their artistic endeavor was devoted to covert expression Ethan Anthony’s The Architecture of Ralph Adams of their sexual preference. I have found no evidence to support his ” 7 Cram and His Office is not a biographical work theories ( ). Although I am inclined to agree with Anthony regard- ing Shand-Tucci’s overemphasis on the homosocial milieu of Cram’s about the once-prominent late nineteenth- and early Boston years (see my own “‘Against an Epoch’: Boston Moderns, 1880–1905” [PhD diss., Boston College, 2005]), Shand-Tucci’s re- search and 1,000+ pages of sometimes overly detailed writing on 1 Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Cram’s life cannot be so summarily dismissed. Readers interested Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964). in more about Cram’s life than what is provided in Anthony’s brief This content downloaded from 130.111.46.40 on Tue, 23 Apr 2013 14:14:56 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 396 Winterthur Portfolio 44:4 Anthony’s work adds to the existing scholarship, been. Indeed, there has been growing interest in however, is a detailed discussion of the evolution Cram and his firm’s work in the last few decades, of the firm itself, as well as unprecedented access and such attention on this complex figure and his to the firm’s own archives. The majority of the stunning portfolio is both well deserved and over- plans, photographs, and renderings on display in due. Anthony, as Cram’s successor, has added his the book are drawn from these archives and cele- straightforward contribution to the considerable re- brate Cram’s place as one of the master practi- covery work already done on Cram, the firm, and tioners of Gothic revival in the United States. their influence on modern American architecture. Although the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City is often considered Cram’s master- Libby MacDonald Bischof work, he also effectively advanced his aesthetic, spiri- University of Southern Maine tual, and practical preference for the neo-Gothic on college campuses throughout the United States. Cram’s entrée into his later prolific university John Bush Jones. All‐Out for Victory! Magazine Ad- work came when the young firm won the architec- vertising and the World War II Home Front. Waltham, tural design competition for the United States Military MA: Brandeis University Press, 2009. 314 pp.; 60 half- Academy at West Point in 1902. Cram, Goodhue, tones and 10 color plates. $50.00. and Ferguson’s neo-Gothic design trumped others from such well-known firms as McKim, Mead, and This is a lavishly illustrated and superbly produced White, according to Anthony, because the firm book on the advertising in ten wide‐circulation proved to the jury that “old forms could be recom- American magazines during World War II: Life, bined to suit contemporary purposes.” The jury Look, Collier’s, Saturday Evening Post, Ladies’ Home Jour- recognized Cram’s appropriate material choice of nal, Esquire, Time, Newsweek, Business Week,andFarm “a local stone that blended with the rugged cliffs Journal and Farmer’s Wife. With sixty black‐and‐white over the Hudson River” to create an attractive illustrations and ten color plates, the reader is treated “Gothic scheme” (24). Throughout his life, Cram to a large selection of wartime advertising in period- fought to resolve the tensions between the medie- icals that are hard to find, most of them now tucked val and the modern (he wrote increasingly polemic away in storage as libraries strive to cut down on van- tracts against modern culture as he got on in years). dalism and look for shelf space. Magazines once oc- Perhaps his designs were his most effective resolu- cupied a central place in American popular culture, tion of that conflict: medieval in design and sensibil- with circulations in the millions, when people had ity but modern in function.2 Success at West Point more time to read and fewer distractions from other enhanced the firm’s reputation and led to increas- media. Advertising fueled this widespread success as ing academic commissions, including new buildings it enabled publishers to sell their magazine subscrip- at Princeton, Rice University, and Sweet Briar Col- tions at a low cost and keep newsstand prices low as lege, among others. Despite the increasing number well. At a time when advertisers feared going out of of academic commissions, however, the firm never business as manufacturers shifted from consumer strayed far from the church building that was such goods to war production, advertising revenue actually adistincthallmarkoftheirsuccess.
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