Ennead Joins CannonDesign

John Hill | 21. April 2026

The David H. Koch Center for Cancer Care at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, designed by Ennead Architects with Perkins Eastman Architects. (Photo: Ennead Architects)

Ennead Architects, the 160-person New York City architecture firm born from the Polshek Partnership, is merging with CannonDesign, the 1,600-person architecture, engineering, and consulting practice with twenty offices in North America and India.

Make that 23 offices in North America, India, and China. With today's announcement of Ennead and CannonDesign joining forces, CannonDesign now gains studios in New York City and Los Angeles, where it already has offices, and breaks into China with Ennead's Shanghai studio.

Per the announcement, Ennead will be a distinct studio within CannonDesign, practicing as Ennead, a CannonDesign company. This situation recalls other studios at CannonDesign, most notably that of Mehrdad Yazdani, who has been with CannonDesign since 2000.

California Institute of Technology Resnick Sustainability Center, designed by the Yazdani Studio of CannonDesign. (Photo: Michael Moran)

“Some of my most vivid memories with my family are weekends at the American Museum of Natural History's Rose Center for Earth and Space, an Ennead project that captures exactly what purposeful design can do. It connects people and creates space where everyone belongs. Our firms share a deep commitment to enriching the public realm, and that common ground is what brought us together. Now we have a profound opportunity to improve civic life at a much greater scale, shaping not just buildings, but the way people experience the world.”
Brad Lukanic, AIA, CannonDesign CEO

Edelman Fossil Park and Museum of Rowan University, designed by Ennead Architects with KSS Architects. (Photo: Ennead Architects)

Founded in 1945 in Niagara Falls, New York, by the two sons of architect Will Cannon, Sr., CannonDesign had grown to 18 offices in the United States alone, plus one in Toronto and one in Mumbai. Two years ago, CannonDesign acquired SRG Partnership, the Portland and Seattle firm best known for projects with Nike.

Ennead Architects came out of the firm established by John Stewart Polshek in 1963 and known as the Polshek Partnership until it was renamed Ennead in 2010. Polshek, a prominent architect and educator in late 20th-century New York City architecture, retired in 2005, won the AIA Gold Medal in 2017, and died in 2022. The term ennead means “a group of nine” and refers to the nine partners who were at the firm in 2010. Ennead established its Shanghai office in 2014 and, as of its tenth anniversary in November 2024, the studio has 22 people under partner Grace Chen.

Shanghai Astronomy Museum, designed by Ennead Architects. (Photo: Ennead Architects)

“Ennead has been continuously evolving as a practice and reinventing itself over the past seven decades, and we recognized the potential for even more ambitious thinking and action. Joining CannonDesign allows us to radically grow our impact on the built environment and invest boldly alongside a firm that has long been leading the transformation of the industry. We are going to build the best design firm in the world.”
Richard Olcott, FAIA, design partner at Ennead Architects

The St. Louis Power House was renovated by CannonDesign in 2007 as the firm's St. Louis office, which World-Architects visited in 2012. (Photo: John Hill/World-Architects)

Ennead is not alone; a number of other medium-to-large-size New York City architects have made similar mergers with larger, older firms outside of NYC over the last twelve months. These include FXCollaborative merging with Montreal's Lemay in July, Architecture Plus Information (A+I) merging with Chicago's Perkins&Will in September, and Cooper Robertson merging with Dallas's Corgan in November.