For Cram & Ferguson Architects, the best architecture has always been the result of thorough and thoughtful research.   

The firm was founded in 1889 by the great American architect, Ralph Adams Cram and his first partner, Charles Francis Wentworth. Cram and Wentworth were expanded to take on Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue when he approached them with a commission to design a church in Dallas.

Desiring to keep Goodhue they took him on as a partner in 1895. Wentworth died in 1897 and was replaced by Frank Ferguson, a structural engineer who established the fledgling firm as an architecture and engineering company.

There followed a 132 year succession of partners and associations up to and including the present-day firm leader Ethan Anthony AIA. By coincidence Anthony is related to Ralph Adams Cram through his grandfather who was Cram’s 5th cousin.

Cram was the leading architect of Collegiate Gothic and church building from 1890 to his death in 1942 and was known for developing church and academic architecture to a high art form. His work includes two cathedrals and many churches large and small.

Cram and Ferguson today has been a leader in the resurgence of traditionally-inspired religious architecture. We have recently completed construction of the new St. John’s Catholic Student Center in Stillwater, Oklahoma, St. Thomas Aquinas University Parish in Charlottesville, Virginia, and Our Lady of Good Voyage Chapel in Boston, Massachusetts.

Our design work is based on research into historical examples and our archive containing many drawings drawn from our commissions, resources that are unique to our firm. We combine this rich heritage of building knowledge with up-to-date construction means and methods producing inspiring building and spaces that are practical and easy to operate and maintain.

These methods have allowed us at Cram and Ferguson to revive methods and details that have, seemed lost to history until now. Lacking craftspeople capable of producing work in high artistry Cram developed an army of crafts providers who could work in high artistic manner.

Today Cram and Ferguson has reawakened the spirit of building arts. Iron work, Murals and Mosaic, woodcraft, art glass and molded stone production have been encouraged and developed but the opportunities provided by our projects.

 Example

St. John Catholic Student Center at Oklahoma State University – Stillwater, The student community at Oklahoma State was housed in an aging facility that occupied a prominent location at the heart of campus. 

Their dream was a new student center including an up-to-date new dining space, quiet study areas and classrooms, offices and more—and a new church that would express in its design and art the unchanging and ancient realities of their faith. 

Working with the center’s pastor, his donor committee, and his staff, we transformed the wish list he had developed through visioning exercise with his student population into a comprehensive program for the new building.

We drew on Italian Romanesque examples throughout.  The church’s exterior is inspired by the medieval Lombard brick architecture of Milan and specifically by careful study of Sant’ Ambrogio in Milan,

The interior draws on the ancient churches of Rome, Venice and Ravenna and their fine frescos telling the stories of Christian life among the disciples. St. John’s, are, as Ruskin expressed it, the word made real in brick and stone.