The life and work of Ralph Adams Cram, the principal architect of many of Sweet Briar’s buildings, is chronicled in a new book by historian Douglass Shand-Tucci titled “Ralph Adams Cram: An Architect’s Four Quests – Medieval, Modernist, American, Ecumenical.” The second of a two-volume biography on Cram, “An Architect’s Four Quests” tells the story of his later career (1900-1942) and some of his most important commissions, including Sweet Briar College.

Although Cram is better known for his work on New York’s Cathedral of St. John the Divine and college campuses such as West Point, Rice University and Princeton, Shand-Tucci begins his 523-page account of the architect’s later work
Author Shand-Tucci calls the cupola (bell tower) the "stunning finale" to Cram's work at Sweet Briar.
with Sweet Briar. It was Cram and his partner Bertram Goodhue’s “first significant collegiate work,” he notes.

Cram is thought to have “warmed” to the Georgian style of the Sweet Briar project and the cause of women’s education, thanks to his wife, Bess, a native Virginian. He had not been particularly enthusiastic about a previous Georgian-style project at Wheaton College, despite its positive impact on his firm.

Cram himself explains in his memoirs: “Brought up within the narrow walls of the hard and dry Puritanism of New England Colonial . . . I really knew nothing, through personal contact, of the more ample, courteous and generally aristocratic Georgian that still exists south of Mason And Dixon’s Line.”

“When, at long last, and chiefly in answer to domestic incitation,” he continued, “I got to know what Richmond, the James River region, Charleston . . . and the other survivals of a beautiful and spacious, but slaughtered past, had to offer as architectural evidence of a great culture, I found in myself a more friendly and generous attitude toward that style. . . .”

Shand-Tucci calls Sweet Briar Cram’s “undoubted masterwork.” And he says he is not alone, noting that scholars, architectural historians — even ones who were, according to the biographer, “no great admirers of Cram” — agree with this high opinion of the Sweet Briar commission.

Author Thomas Gains in his 1991 book, “The Campus as a Work of Art,” surely startled more than a few people by including Sweet Briar among the top 50 most beautiful campuses in the country, Shand-Tucci writes.

But, he says the best judgment on Sweet Briar comes from an anonymous report of the National Park Service, which called for the designation of the College as a historic district.

Shand-Tucci closes his account of the Sweet Briar project and its significance to Cram and Goodhue, by concluding that the College’s master plan of 1902 was “a portent of things to come” for the partners.

“Ralph Adams Cram: An Architect’s Four Quests — Medieval, Modernist, American, Ecumenical” includes more than 130 photographs and drawings. It can be read on its own or in conjunction with the biography’s first volume, “Boston Bohemia, 1881-1900.”

— By Michelle Lurch-Shaw, SBC staff writer