Forum Network

Historian Douglass Shand-Tucci discusses Ralph Adams Cram's architectural monuments as well as Cram's Boston work. Shand-Tucci explores the Cowley monastery in Cambridge, Wellesley College, and masterpieces both ecclesiastical and residential in Gloucester, Nahant, Dorchester, Cohasset, and Brookline and on Beacon Hill, as well as Cram's only skyscraper, in Post Office Square.

When Ralph Adams Cram appeared on the cover of Time magazine in 1926, he was Boston's foremost architect and one of America's cultural leaders. Influenced by such disparate figures as Henry Adams, Phillips Brooks, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Cram was the designer of West Point, Princeton, and Rice Universities, and of churches; from St. Thomas Fifth Avenue to St. Vincent's, Los Angeles.

Douglass Shand-Tucci is a historian of American art and architecture and Boston/New England studies. He has most recently written Harvard University in 2001, with photographs by Richard Cheek and an introduction by then-Harvard President Neil Rudendstine. The first volume of his biography of Cram, published in 1994 by the University of Massachusetts Press, earned extraordinary reviews.