Ethan Anthony 'Forum' article in the December Issue of Traditional Building Magazine

"We humans are extremists. We tend to see best by contrast, in polarities and without shades of grey. Ralph Adams Cram
yearned for a philosophical and learned approach to architecture.
Reading in his father William's study in the parsonage of the First
Unitarian church in Westford, MA, talking with the men of his extended
family as they made shoes in a little shed on his family farm through
the long New England winters in Hampton, NH, or practicing French in
the one-room school house where he was taught by his mother, Sarah
Blake Cram, he was inducted into an intellectual way of life.

Intellectual
curiosity led him when he was at last on his own as a young
architectural apprentice at the firm of Roach and Tilden in Boston, to
yearn for an architecture that was more than mere slavish copy of a
master work. He sought an architecture that had an inner spirit. And
having found that inner spirit most powerfully resident in religious
architecture he sought to design churches.

Through designing churches, Cram hoped to change his society. Early on,
he hoped to improve the artistic impulse of the people, to educate the
public through his position as a crusading art critic for the Boston
Transcript and thus to create a climate where inferior art would be
shunned in favor of more sophisticated and more intellectual work. He
was somewhat successful, saving Copley Square from falling into the
hands of a developer who would have filled it in with apartment
buildings. His crusading impulse soon met with complaints from
advertisers whose shows he panned. Job lost, he had to look for another
outlet for his crusading."  See the entire article at:

http://www.traditional-building.com/Previous-Issues-10/DecemberForum10.html