SPECTERS OF SPAIN

Architectural Media presents

Specters of Spain: The Spanish Gothic Architecture of Ralph Adams Cram™

so now Spanish Gothic would pervade his dreaming hours *

Specters of Spain: The Spanish Gothic Architecture of Ralph Adams Cram is a 15-episode full-color, high-definition video series documenting the Spanish Gothic monuments of Ralph Adams Cram, one of the greatest late-19th century and early-20th century neo-Gothic architects.

This 90+ minute episodic film project, photographed and edited by John Gomez as an extension to his 2008 Columbia University Master of Science in Historic Preservation thesis - Church of the Sacred Heart in Jersey City, New Jersey: A History and Analysis of Ralph Adams Cram's Seminal Spanish Gothic Masterwork - currently consists of two major iconic sites: East Liberty Presbyterian Church and Holy Rosary Church, standing in the great Gothic city of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Additional sites such as Knowles Memorial Chapel on the Spain-induced campus of Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida, and the newly-restored Episcopal Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Morningside Heights, Manhattan, are forthcoming as the series expands.

The roster of high-definition films currently screening here include the following:

EAST LIBERTY PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH

Film I: The Dream Lantern

Film II: The Folds and the Portals

Film III: Under A Medieval Moon

Film IV: Rapture in the Antechamber

Film V: The Gothic Core

Film VI: Chapel of Changing Light

Film VII: Enter the Chancel

Film VIII: Shadows and Passages

Film IX: A Vision

Film X: Courtyard of the Singing Birds

HOLY ROSARY CHURCH

Film I: Apparition in Allegheny County

Film II: The Pinnacles of Pittsburgh

Film III: Etched in Limestone

Film IV: Palma Reborn

Film V: Mark of the Craftsmen

Note: Please do not download or embed these films without permission! Contact Architectural Media directly at architecturalmedia@gmail.com.

* Douglass Shand-Tucci, architectural historian and Ralph Adams Cram biographer. His two-volume opus on Cram's life and work is magisterial and can be purchased online: Vol. I: Boston Bohemia, 1881-1900: Ralph Adams Cram: Life and Architecture (1995); Vol. II: An Architect's Four Quests: Medieval, Modernist, American, Ecumenical (2005)

East Liberty Presbyterian Church

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Film I: The Dream Lantern

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East Liberty Presbyterian Church

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Film II: The Folds and the Portals

Watch in WIDESCREEN

East Liberty Presbyterian Church

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Film III: Under A Medieval Moon

Watch in WIDESCREEN

East Liberty Presbyterian Church

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Film IV: Rapture in the Antechamber

Watch in WIDESCREEN

East Liberty Presbyterian Church

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Film V: The Gothic Core

Watch in WIDESCREEN

East Liberty Presbyterian Church

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Film VI: Chapel of Changing Light

Watch in WIDESCREEN

East Liberty Presbyterian Church

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Film VII: Enter the Chancel

Watch in WIDESCREEN

East Liberty Presbyterian Church

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Film VIII: Shadows and Passages

Watch in WIDESCREEN

East Liberty Presbyterian Church
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Film IX: A Vision

Watch in WIDESCREEN

East Liberty Presbyterian Church

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Film X: Courtyard of the Singing Birds

Watch in WIDESCREEN

Holy Rosary Church
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Film I: Apparition in Allegheny County

Watch in WIDESCREEN

Holy Rosary Church
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Film II: The Pinnacles of Pittsburgh

Watch in WIDESCREEN

Holy Rosary Church
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Film III: Etched in Limestone

Watch in WIDESCREEN

Holy Rosary Church
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Film IV: Palma Reborn

Watch in WIDESCREEN

Holy Rosary Church
Pittsburgh, Pensylvania
Film V: Mark of the Craftsmen

Watch in WIDESCREEN

Acknowledgements for SPECTERS OF SPAIN™

These filmic documents, initiated by Church of the Sacred Heart in Jersey City, New Jersey: A History and Analysis of Ralph Adams Cram's Seminal Spanish Gothic Masterwork, a 2007-2008 Columbia University graduate school school thesis by John Gomez, were made possible by the support, assistance and guidance of the following:

The 2008 James Marston Fitch Thesis Prize
Bestowed by Preservation Alumni, Inc.
Historic Preservation Program
Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation
Columbia University

Douglass Shand-Tucci
Ralph Adams Cram Biographer and
Architectural Historian
Boston, Massachusetts

Albert M. Tannler
Wright Goodhue Scholar and
Historical Collections Director,
Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation

Ralph Adams Cram Collection
Fine Arts Department
Boston Public Library
Boston, Massachusetts

East Liberty Presbyterian Church
The Rev. Dr. Randall K. Bush, Pastor
Pamela M. Kimmel, Business Administrator
And the Entire Clergy, Staff and Congregation
of the "Cathedral of Hope"
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

The Rev. David Taylor
Holy Rosary Church
St. Charles Lwanga Parish
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Andrew S. Dolkart
James Marston Fitch Professor of Historic Preservation and
Thesis Advisor to John Gomez

Historic Preservation Program
Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation
Columbia University

Copyright 2008 Architectural Media Company. All rights reserved.

COMING SOON TO ARCHITECTURAL MEDIA - IN FULL HIGH-DEFINITION COLOR & SOUND!

Specters of Spain: The Spanish Gothic Architecture of Ralph Adams Cram™ series continues in high-def color and sound with Knowles Memorial Chapel on the palm-lined campus of Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida.

Knowles Memorial Chapel is a stunning stucco-slathered vernacular edifice of flat and curving minimalist planes and planars pierced by eye-popping polychromatic open-timber truss ceilings copied from ancient Spanish precedents, towering wrought-bronze parclose chancel screens, and original carved oak reredos, framed Renaissance-worthy oil paintings, and hand-hewn side aisle benches - all intact and frozen in time along the old-growth tree-draped banks of Lake Virginia.

Here is a subtropical climate, a certain Spanish tradition in point of historical antecedents, wrote Cram in his 1936 autobiography, My Life in Architecture, published on the eve of the chapel's completion. What we did was to consult the earlier and simpler Mexican-Spanish churches before they came too baroque, such for instance as the Franciscan Missions in the Southwest and in California, and then merge with this basic impulse elements from the original Spanish Gothic...It was as a whole another synthesis, which cannot be associated intimately with any particular time or place...

Watch in WIDESCREEN

COMING SOON TO ARCHITECTURAL MEDIA - IN FULL HIGH-DEFINITION COLOR & SOUND!

Specters of Spain: The Spanish Gothic Architecture of Ralph Adams Cram™ series continues in high-def color and sound with The Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in Morningside Heights, Manhattan. Cram's greatest Gothic Revival reach, St. John the Divine holds some of the architect's most supremely bold yet surprisingly subtle Spanish Gothic elements. Here, at one of the highest pinnacles in New York City, the ancient Spanish cathedral form unfolds in great sweeps, climbs and turns - inside and out.

Featuring cinematography and editing by Columbia University graduate and Architectural Media founder John Gomez.

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"This [East Liberty Presbyterian Church] was one of those opportunities that come no more than once in a lifetime, and is the sort of thing an architect sees in his dreams, but hardly hopes for in realization: a church of cathedral size and general design, cruciform, with a great chancel and lofty tower and spire over the crossing; built of solid masonry even to the high vaults, and with all manner of chapels, school, and social rooms; furthermore, an expressed desire on the part of the donors that this should be the finest example of church building the architects could accomplish and that money could buy."

- Ralph Adams Cram (My Life in Architecture: 253)

“For all the splendor and boldness of his nave of St. John the Divine - work of great originality and power - there is a very different order at East Liberty. The longitudinal arches of the nave are kept so low as to seem almost openings into tunnels…tunnels topped by a boldly sculptural and deeply shadowed triforium that serves as a kind of predella for a soaring, sheer clerestory of tremendous height. And this new order in Cram’s work, born of a thoughtful union surely of Liverpool Cathedral and the nave of St. John the Divine, though it never surpasses the glory of either of those two masterworks, does signal somehow a Gothic that, if only measurably Moderne, is triumphantly New World American. Within the huge interior the palette is gray-white, the profiles crisply modeled, the whole set off by ‘gull-illumined seas’ of blue Connick glass that sings to the vast interior in the coolest possible way.”

- Douglass Shand-Tucci (Ralph Adams Cram: An Architect’s Four Quests – Chapter 11: Moderne Denouement: 495)

"We could and did call in all the practitioners of the allied arts, to join with us: sculptors, stained-glass workers, metal workers, woodworkers, marble workers...a church is a lot more than architecture; it is, or should be, a plexus of all the arts...Everything else is there: the broad and deep sanctuary with its canopied clergy and choirstalls, its ten-foot altar of inlaid marbles, lofty reredos with John Angel's supreme bas-relief of the Last Supper, and statues of saints, the richly carved stone pulpit on one side, the equally elaborate lectern on the other, the full complement of stained glass windows showing Christian history from the Creation onward, and the symbolism of the carvings in stone and wood..."

Ralph Adams Cram (My Life in Architecture: 254-55)

“The great glory of the East Liberty Church, however, is not within – wonderful though that is – but without, for it is there that Cram’s love of the Gothic church and his fascination with the modernist skyscraper met…So intense was this love affair that he even somewhat overcame his disdain for the Gothic skyscraper, once he was sure it was but the first (and passing) stage of the form’s evolution. Thus Cram would write: ‘Steel and the elevator…engendered an obvious verticality and in Mr. Woolworth’s tower it came to birth…Here at last was not only convincing logic but unquestioned beauty [which was] there in the lofty erection, its delicate crest veiled, from time to time, in drifting clouds, and from the moment of its completion a new style, a new organism was born.’”

- Douglass Shand-Tucci (Ralph Adams Cram: An Architect’s Four Quests – Chapter 11: Moderne Denouement: 495-96)

“Now consider the lofty Gothic tower of East Liberty Church – Cram’s last tower, as it turned out. You do not have to look at it very long to understand why – once it is pointed out – that just as the Gothic font of St. John the Divine betrays the contribution of the Renaissance to Cram Gothic, so does East Liberty’s tower disclose the extent, finally, of the modernist contribution to this finale of Cram Gothic. A glorious Gothic tower it is – and inspired by that ‘modern synthesis of technology and romance’: the Empire State Building.”

- Douglass Shand-Tucci (Ralph Adams Cram: An Architect’s Four Quests – Chapter 11: Moderne Denouement: 498)

"Palma de Mallorca Cathedral, Cram asserted, the minute he saw it, rivaled even Seville, and, until he saw Hagia Sophia - not for another ten years - Palma commanded his most heartfelt loyalty. Some sense of Palma's meaning and importance to him is evident in his remarkable declaration that 'the vast masonry masses of Seville are reduced [at Palma] to slender shafts, the spans are widened, the whole thing made more open and luminous, but the soaring height obtained by the elimination of the triforium is retained and the result is a lightness that has some of the elements of ecstasy.'"

- Douglass Shand-Tucci (Ralph Adams Cram: An Architect’s Four Quests – Chapter 7: Mediterranean Inspirations: 250-251)

"...who created the marvel of Palma? The choir, perhaps, by one of King Jaime's military engineers...but the great nave, unique and stupendous in its quality, was, I am persuaded, the work of that Mallorquin genius, Jaime Fabre, who built also the quite triumphant and equally original Cathedral of Barcelona, together with those other Catalan churches of singular individuality, Santa Maria del Mar and Santa Maria del Pino. If this is so, then he was one of the outstanding geniuses of the Middle Ages."

Ralph Adams Cram (My Life in Architecture: 142)

“It is the exterior [Holy Rosary Church, Pittsburgh], however, which is most memorable. Vastly more ornamental than was Cram’s usual practice, it is perhaps the most elegantly detailed exterior he ever essayed, though the underlying strength of mass is still keenly felt. And nothing could be more evident than that the design reflected his ardor for the greatest, as he saw it, of Spanish cathedrals. As Stephen Klukas has written, ‘Although Holy Rosary is in no sense a “copy” of the Cathedral of Palma de Mallorca, it is…an outgrowth of Palma…The parallels are remarkable…Both [churches]…are five-aisled Basilicas divided by tall, slender piers which support attenuated, ribbed vaults. Rose windows terminate the vistas in both churches…Holy Rosary’s pantile roof is almost flat and hidden behind a traceried parapet, as at Palma. The west front is an exercise in miniaturization, for the vast scale of the Palma façade is reduced to a mere fourth at Holy Rosary; even more telling is that the famous mirador portal is reproduced on the side porch in Pittsburgh…The tower of the Holy Rosary also has a precedent in Palma, not at the cathedral but rather at a conventional church to the northwest of the cathedral…Holy Rosary is as much a masterpiece of modern adaption from Spanish sources as Calvary [Pittsburgh] is of English sources.’”

- Douglass Shand-Tucci (Ralph Adams Cram: An Architect’s Four Quests – Chapter 7: Mediterranean Inspirations: 259-60)

"...Father Maladey was himself of such an appealing personality that he was a sufficient inspiration. His church had to have a very large seating capacity, the building area was not large, and available funds were even smaller. I was fresh from my studies of the Catalonian churches, so naturally we took as our point d' appui the Jaime Fabre churches with their very slender, widely spaced columns, and the side aisles almost as high as the nave - the result being a very large seating area with little or no obstruction of view, spacious, airy, and full of light...The Catalan setting-out implied a consonant architectural treatment, but the Spanish quality is not very obtrusive and it certainly is not archeological."

- Ralph Adams Cram (My Life in Architecture: 241)

[At Holy Rosary Church, Cram] "endowed an Irish-American parish with a Spanish Gothic church! It was all the more impressive as being rooted not in some forced idea of diversity but in an honest attempt to produce a functional design response to evident need: a modern adaptation of Catalonian architecture, with its few and slender piers and overall spaciousness, was just what this immense parish needed, not an adaptation of Irish Gothic with its dense forest of massive piers. Controversial? Certainly. Not everyone was open to Cram's expanding vision - ecumenical or multicultural." -

- Douglass Shand-Tucci (Ralph Adams Cram: An Architect’s Four Quests – Chapter 10: The Ecumenical Quest: 444)