"[1] Of "Carpenter Gothic," for example, Cram had written, "the sheer savagery of these box-like wooden structures, with their toothpick pinnacles and their adventitious buttresses of seven-eights-inch board and their jigsaw ornament, find no rival in all history.

"[2] Cram forcefully argued that nineteenth-century American Gothic has resulted in nothing but sham and pretentiousness, and he considered the fifty-year period after 1930 to have been "worse than at any time or in any place recorded in history.

According to Cram, the nineteenth-century Gothicists had been guilty of practicing "archaeology" rather than art, through the servile imitation of historical models.

Cram, thus, argued for a return to the first principles of Gothic architecture whereby the artificial, derivative qualities of the previous decades could be avoided and a new organic structural integrity as well as functional responsiveness could be gained.

In short, he advised architects "to study the motives and principles of Medieval Christian architecture rather than the mouldings.