Ralph Adams Cram

Ralph Adams Cram, (December_16, 1863 - September_22, 1942), was an American architect of collegiate and ecclesiastical buildings, often in the gothic style. His work is represented on a number of campuses, including Cornell University, Sweet Briar College, University of Richmond, Williams College, Rice University, Wheaton College in Massachusetts, the United States Military Academy, and St. George's School, but he is most closely associated with Princeton, where he served as Consulting Architect from 1907 to 1929.

From 1898 to 1914 he was in partnership with Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue in the Boston firm then known as Cram, Goodhue and Ferguson.

Born into a Unitarian clerical family, as a young man Cram considered himself an agnostic. But after a dramatic conversion during Christmas Eve mass in Rome in 1887, he became and remained a fervent Anglo-Catholic. As author and lecturer as well as architect, he propounded an aesthetique holding that the Renaissance was in part an unfortunate dead-end detour for western culture: authentic development could come only by picking up where it had left off, i.e. by taking inspiration from Gothic.

Cram's churches include: