Ralph Adams Cram and others built churches that enriched our nation’s architectural patrimony
Gothic is a challenging style for the modern architect, and considering the ancient precedents, it’s easy to see why. The sculpted masses of medieval cathedrals and large churches display an overwhelming profusion of statuary and ornament. Such abundance is carried into nave, transept and choir, with piers surging upward like trees, while stained glass bathes lofty, vaulted spaces in a celestial aura. An array of crafts — wood carving, work in gold, silver and wrought iron, even needlework for altar coverings — contributes to the richness of detail at a variety of scales.
Largely obscured by classicism’s Renaissance-era reemergence, the Gothic idiom began to attract attention again during the 18th century; a full-fledged Gothic revival got under way in Britain during the 19th century and echoed across the Atlantic.
Eventually, an American architect arrived on the scene with profound insight into the logic of Gothic design, along with a determination to make Gothic a living tradition again: Ralph Adams Cram (1863–1942), a Yankee Anglo-Catholic who was the son of a Unitarian minister.
Mr. Cram’s oeuvre includes his titanic, partially executed design for the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in New York City as well as his post headquarters at West Point and Graduate College and Chapel at Princeton. But Pittsburgh, which boasts three excellent Cram churches, is as good a place as any to appreciate not only his artistic prowess but also his broader influence.
Mr. Cram’s family couldn’t afford to send him to college, so at 17, he was apprenticed to a small Boston architectural firm, where he came under the spell of Henry Hobson Richardson (1838–86). The mighty granite and brownstone masses of Mr. Richardson’s Romanesque Trinity Church (1877) on Boston’s Copley Square signified to Mr. Cram and other architects of his generation that American architecture was finally emerging from a dark age besotted with uninformed eclecticism and that hapless striving for picturesque effect that particularly infected the nation’s Gothic buildings. It’s fitting that Mr. Cram would do some of his best work in Pittsburgh, home to Mr. Richardson’s masterwork, the Allegheny County Courthouse and Jail (1888).
Calvary Episcopal Church
Like Mr. Richardson and other architects he admired, Mr. Cram focused on the imposing arrangement of masses. This preoccupation is evident in one of his first realizations of a contemporary Gothic idiom: Calvary Church (1907), in Pittsburgh’s Shadyside neighborhood.
Outside, this white limestone temple owes much of its power to the simple treatment of its well-proportioned masses. Mr. Cram’s approach, while inspired by the ruined Cistercian abbeys he had visited in England, takes a strikingly modern cast at Calvary. The exterior’s limited carved detail is astutely deployed; the tower, with small hooded openings in its spire is an abstract creation of a high order. On the belfry, Mr. Cram masterfully deployed corner buttresses as chamfers to effect the transition from the square lantern below to the octagonal spire above.
Inside, Mr. Cram focused on enriching the space with stained-glass windows — commissioned over several decades from different fabricators to avoid monotony — while marking the entry to the chancel with a magnificent screen carved in white oak. Mr. Cram enriched the shafts of this intricate structure with grapevines and colonnettes. An equally gorgeous oak altarpiece is richly encrusted with niches and sacred statuary.
Mr. Cram saw himself, among other things, as a coordinator of the decorative arts. At Calvary and elsewhere, he employed the exceptionally skillful Bavarian-born wood-carver Johannes Kirchmayer and promoted the work of glassmen who had adopted medieval techniques.
East Liberty Presbyterian
Mr. Cram’s other well-known Pittsburgh church arose nearly three decades after Calvary, amid the Great Depression and at cathedral scale: East Liberty Presbyterian Church (1935). The church seats 2,000, but Mr. Cram’s ensemble includes chapels as well as a parish hall with an auditorium and Sunday school and other facilities arranged around a courtyard. The church’s broad tower, rising 300 feet, is more elaborate than Calvary’s. As befits its cathedral-like character, East Liberty’s interior is finished in stone.
The scale of the main vault running from nave to chancel is majestic, with the massive nave piers configured as clustered colonnettes, from which a network of ribs spreads across the ceiling. Architectural detail in the nave — bathed in the dominant deep blues and rich reds of the stained glass — is restrained, though an elegant gallery runs above the low, narrow aisles.
The chancel’s richly carved marble altarpiece resembles an elaborate Gothic facade, with towers at each end. The towers frame a relief sculpture, 11 feet wide, of the Last Supper by the Englishman John Angel. Solitary saints stand in niches above the relief. Over the stone pulpit hovers a stunning wooden canopy shaped like the church’s great tower.
Mr. Cram did some of his best work at an intimate scale, including his Gordon Chapel (1919), which serves as the “Lady Chapel” of the Church of the Ascension (1898), located, like Calvary, in Shadyside. The chapel’s woodwork, probably wrought by Mr. Kirchmayer, includes exquisite swirling foliated ornament, framing an Annunciation sculpture over the entrance. An altar with a carved and painted triptych looks as if it were made for a late medieval palace in Italy or Spain.
Mr. Cram built Calvary mainly with money from the industrialist, financier and art collector Henry Clay Frick, and East Liberty was underwritten by Richard Beatty and Jennie King Mellon, whose tombs rest in another beautiful Cram chapel within that church. But not all of Mr. Cram’s patrons were plutocrats.
In Homewood, Mr. Cram built the Church of the Holy Rosary (1930) for a large Catholic congregation with a modest budget. Now closed, it inhabits what has become a troubled neighborhood.
Holy Rosary is mainly inspired by the Gothic architecture of Catalonia, especially in the spacious interior, with its elongated piers. But in the way its brilliant massing turns a tight corner site to the church’s advantage, in the reworking of old architectural motifs into a vitally new synthesis and in the sure grasp of monumental scale and ornamental enrichment that it conveys, this magnificent church, with its array of pinnacles and superb corner porch, is pure Cram.
Magical stained glass
Mr. Cram’s insistence on stained glass’s historical character as an architectural membrane — a diaphanous mosaic rather than a backlit tableau of the Tiffany ilk — yielded abundant fruit in Pittsburgh.
Calvary is home to some of the earliest windows fabricated in this country in the medieval manner. The technique involves setting small pieces of “antique” or transparent, handblown glass within leaden dividers, with the resulting glass panels separated by iron bars. The level of intricacy is higher than in Tiffany glass, in which the lead is used to delineate forms. Mr. Cram employed antique glass not to infuse Calvary’s interior with a uniform glow but to enhance the modulations of light, shade and shadow that the architecture generates.
The mosaic-like richness of traditional stained glass shines with special brilliance in the windows at First Baptist Church (1912) in Pittsburgh’s Oakland neighborhood. This church, a handsome, if more emphatically faceted, interpretation of Gothic by Mr. Cram’s sometime partner, Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue (1869–1924), is decorated with grayish glass. Each window features a row of small but brightly colored figurative Christian symbols that stand out against a background that shifts in tint and tone in a subtly irregular manner. Some of the symbols are easily recognizable, some not, but all are tied to the themes of Christ’s birth, ministry, death and resurrection.
These windows bring not color but an ethereal light into the church. They are the work of Charles Connick (1875–1945), perhaps America’s greatest glassman and a Western Pennsylvania native whose career flourished largely thanks to Mr. Cram’s patronage.
Heinz Memorial Chapel
It is doubtful that the enchanting Heinz Memorial Chapel (1938), the work of the distinguished Philadelphia architect Charles Zeller Klauder (1872–1938), would grace the University of Pittsburgh campus if not for Mr. Cram’s impact on American architecture.
At first glance, Heinz Chapel, with its emphatically vertical massing and crowning fleche, might register as a knockoff of the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris. It isn’t. The transverse volume housing the transepts that rises above the longitudinal nave-and-chancel volume is distinctive, and so is the interior treatment of the great crossing piers. The four main crossing arches suggest Gothicized Roman bridges or aqueducts. Inside and outside, decorative details are superbly arrayed, often with great delicacy.
The shallow transepts contain four double-lancet stained-glass windows by Mr. Connick — at 73 feet, among the tallest in the world. The holy figures atop the transept lancets are 8 feet tall. Mr. Connick’s two dozen Heinz Chapel windows bathe the interior in rich blue tints, flecked with flaming reds along with green, violet and yellow accents.
Jewel-like vignettes in the windows house almost 400 identified figures and many others. The arrangement is medieval, but the figure work is modernistic. Mr. Connick produced charming windows devoted to American historical events and legends that, thematically, encompass an almost scholastic vision in which the labors of spiritual and secular luminaries, male and female, testify to biblical verities.
Though clad in limestone inside and out, Heinz Chapel has a steel frame — not that you would notice. Across a green from the chapel stands Mr. Klauder’s Cathedral of Learning (1937), a 535-foot-tall skyscraper, its receding, asymmetrical and generously detailed masses also limestone-clad. In astutely fusing Gothic and art deco elements, it seemingly answers Mr. Cram’s call in his memoirs for “tradition plus modernism.”
True, a 42-floor classroom building was not a practical idea. And to judge by the tall buildings that he designed for Boston late in his career, Mr. Cram might have preferred a more overtly modernistic structure, while Heinz Chapel’s concealed steel frame violated his romantic insistence on “truthful” construction. The Cathedral of Learning is nonetheless a cherished landmark and a sobering reminder of the humanistic path not taken in the design of tall buildings in the postwar era.
Along with the fine Pittsburgh churches erected by Mr. Cram and kindred spirits, it testifies to an enlightened artistic outlook that, over two generations, accommodated informed emulation of past achievements along with sound innovation — all to the enrichment of the nation’s architectural patrimony.
This piece originally appeared in Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, an adaptation of City Journal's Autumn 2015 Issue
This piece originally appeared in Pittsburgh Post-Gazette