CannonDesign's Global Expansion: How a Merger with Ennead Architects Unlocks New Markets and Long-Term Client Strategies

Two architecture firms that are leading designers in the increasingly costly and complex realms of health care and higher education facilities are joining together.

CannonDesign, one of the world’s largest employee-owned architecture and planning firms, is acquiring Ennead Architects, a leader in education, health care, and civic projects. Ennead will continue its practice as a distinct unit within CannonDesign and retain the firm’s offices in New York, Los Angeles, and Shanghai.

This merger is the seventh and largest so far for CannonDesign, which employs some 1,600 designers and consultants across 20 offices in North America. One of the company’s goals is to bring down costs and deliver better projects by taking a broader view of a client’s needs over decades, not just project by project.

The acquisition gives CannonDesign its first office in Asia, where Ennead has designed several large-scale civic, cultural, and multiuse buildings, including ByteDance’s Houhai Center in Shenzhen and the Shanghai Astronomy Museum.

Ennead is a New York–based firm that grew out of the Polshek Partnership, a firm founded by designer and Columbia University architecture dean James Polshek in 1963.

The two firms overlap most clearly in the fields of health care and education. Both Cannon and Ennead have designed projects for Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, among other hospitals, as well as multiple higher-ed campus plans and research institutions.

The firms are also members of the American Institute of Architects’ Large Firm Roundtable, a forum of the leaders of the 60 largest architecture firms in the US. Discussions at the forum highlighting a shared sense of culture led to the acquisition, which will be finalized within 45 days.

“When I joined the Polshek Partnership, we were 60 people, and I purposely went to a firm at that scale,” says Molly McGowan, a partner at Ennead. “Watching us grow to 200 but maintain the values of knowing everybody when you’re only 60 — we’re now seeing the same opportunity of joining a firm like Cannon, because they managed to hold on to the values of a smaller 200-person firm.”

Photographer: Michael Moran

CannonDesign CEO Brad Lukanic said that its acquisitions are part of a strategy of transitioning from a “3 to 30” relationship with its clients. Typically an architecture firm might spend one year working with a client on a design and two years as the project is being built, whereas a 30-year timeframe reflects an ongoing relationship. Lukanic said these relationships will be crucial to addressing problems such as the rising cost of health care and changing needs for higher education.

Ennead’s practice has a similarly long-term constitution: The firm has worked with New York University for more than 25 years, for example, with Ennead delivering 10 campus buildings so far.

“What that allows us to do is to build an incredibly deep knowledge of who they are as an institution. They can pick up the phone and say, ‘Hey, can I just get your opinion about that?’” says McGowan.

For its part, the merger gives Ennead access to experts and resources for which designers would otherwise turn to consultants. Last year CannonDesign acquired The Clarient Group, a smart-buildings company that helps engineers and architects (including Ennead) to incorporate digital systems and other technology needs into a project from the earliest stages. Bringing the companies together “provides the design teams even greater access to that talent, versus the traditional architect-consultant relationship, because they are now all part of the team,” Lukanic says.

The acquisition marks the second significant transition for Ennead, whose name refers to the nine partners who renamed the firm following the departure of Polshek in 2010. The firm (as Polshek Partnership) won the AIA’s Architecture Firm award in 1992; Polshek himself won the AIA Gold Medal in 2018, four years before his death.

CannonDesign has earned scores of industry accolades, including the AIA national design awards for health care and education in 2025. As a privately held company CannonDesign did not disclose the purchase amount for the acquisition.