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Ralph Adams Cram

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"RALPH ADAMS CRAM (1863-), American architect, was born at Hampton Falls, N.H., Dec. 16 1863. He was educated at the Westford (Mass.) Academy and the Exeter (N.H.) high school. He studied architecture in a Boston office, was for a time art critic on the Boston Transcript and in 1889 opened an architect's office in Boston. He had a profound knowledge of mediaeval architecture and was an able advocate of the Gothic style, employed by him in many church and college buildings. Examples of his successful ecclesiastical work include St. Thomas's church, New York; Calvary church, Pittsburgh; St. Paul's cathedral, Detroit; the Fourth Presbyterian church, Chicago; and St. Alban's cathedral, Toronto. He was consulting architect for the cathedral of St. John the Divine, New York. He designed buildings for the Princeton graduate school, Sweet Briar College the Rice Institute (Texas), Williams College, Williamstown, Mass., and Phillips Academy at Exeter, N.H. In 1903 his plans were accepted for remodelling the U.S. Military Academy. In 1914 he was appointed professor of Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

His numerous writings include Church Building (1901); The Ruined Abbeys of Great Britain (1905); Impressions of Japanese Architecture and the Allied Arts (1906); the Gothic Quest (1907); The Ministry of Art (1914); Heart of Europe (1915); The Substance of Gothic (1916, Lowell lectures); The Nemesis of Mediocrity (1918); The Great Thousand Years (1918); The Sins of the Fathers (1919); Walled Towns (1919) and Gold, Frankincense, and Myrrh (1919).