Ralph Adams Cram: An Architect's Four Quests- Medieval, Modernists, American, Ecumenical

11. Moderne Denouement

1 1 MODERNE DENOUEMENT 111 would change be ... were it not for the change beyond the change. —Ralph Adams Cram quoting William Morris [T]he life of our epoch [is] clear and crisply simplified forms. —Walter Gropius 56. Cram's 1935 design of the Bourne Bridge to Cape Cod south of Boston only makes sense when one remembers how much he admired the Washington Monument in the United States capital. According to Carl Conduit in American Building Art in 1961 Cram's design was the Number One Prize Bridge of the American Institute of Steel Construction. .BETWEEN the American quest and the ecumenical quest, both of which reached their climax in the last decade of Cram's life and work—each in some sense a revisiting if not a revisal of the medieval and the modernist quests that peaked earlier in his life—there was, early and late, all the time, the architectural quest, which for Cram in the 19305 was a Moderne denouement. And in this respect as in the others, Cram's last chapter was in many ways best of all. I recall how startled I was to come across his personal stationery of the 19305 while studying his correspondence. A vivid green line, streamlined from one sideof the top of the page to the other; above the line, in the same vivid green: "R. A. Cram." It is not the stationery, I realized as I was handling it, that I would have expected . Nor, when I came to think of it was Cram's office stationery by then. In the early 19005, a letter from Cram, Goodhue and Ferguson would have delighted the most ardent Goth: old English Gothic lettering in Goodhue's best Medieval style was elegantly intertwined with ornamental fleur-de-lis. But Cram's post-World War I office letterhead was instead a very chaste, chic, stripped-down modern classic design—a small but telling symbol of the evolution of Cram's aesthetic after World War I. So was his Deco green stationery of the thirties. Once discovered, this new aesthetic startles. Indeed, so highly compartmentalized is the world of American art and architectural history and historic preservation, where neo-Gothic enthusiasts and Art Deco aficionados are hardly even aware of each other, the authors of a book of 1994, Rediscovering Art Deco U.S.A., may not have realized what a dramatic disclosure it would be to most fans of Cram who stumbled upon their guide to learn that Boston's older John Hancock tower, with its "Deco ziggurat top . .. crowned by a rocket-like weather beacon," though much delayed by World War II and not built until 1947, had, in fact, been designed by Cram in the late 19305. Even more striking is the authors' assertion in their guide to American Deco and Moderne architecture that in the 19205 and 19305 Cram and Ferguson [were] Boston's most successfulArt Deco practitioners . . . responsible for the 1932. U.S.Post Office and Courthouse. This huge pile sits at one end of a triangular park [in Boston's Post Office Square], part of a splendid Art Deco vista that is unparalleled in the U.S.A. At the opposite end ... is the New England Telephone Headquarters building . . . [another] delayed Deco work of Cram and Ferguson.1 Cram Deco? So incongruous is the idea one can hardly blame those (including me, really, twenty years ago) who too quickly dismissed such buildings as "office 455 M O D E R N E D E N O U E M E N T work" in which Cram himself was unlikely to have been much involved. Yetthe design of Cram and Ferguson's Hancock Tower is actually importantly similar to Goodhue's Chicago Tribune entry, while the Hancock's crowning Deco motif reflects similar motifs of a number of skyscraper designs Cram himself wrote admiringly about in his architectural criticism of the 19305. As it turns out, Ralph Adams Cram really was fascinated (his word) by skyscrapers—and not "Gothic" skyscrapers either! Again, a seriously misleading impression has been uncritically accepted. Scholars now, as critics then, have always been quick to pick up on Cram's provoking one-liners—"the modernist mania which is the nemesis of vital art," for example— but hardly ever bother to read further. In the very next sentence after that pronouncement , for example, Cram went on to write of the "modernist movement...