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What is Cuningham?
Cuningham is an architecture, interior design, urban design and landscape architecture firm. Its work spans schools, hospitals, housing, hotels, offices and adaptive-reuse projects, with a stated emphasis on creating "enduring experiences for a healthy world." The practice combines design services across multiple disciplines, so a client can engage it for a building's architecture and its interiors, or for broader planning and landscape work.
What the portfolio suggests
The project list shows the firm's range more concretely than a service description does:
- Education: Rock Ridge High School in Virginia, Minnesota, and the EPIC campus for Littleton Public Schools in Colorado, a hands-on learning facility adapted from a former car dealership site.
- Healthcare: Valleywise Health Medical Center's Roosevelt Acute Care Replacement Hospital in Phoenix, and a five-floor vertical expansion at Banner Desert Medical Center in Mesa, Arizona, adding bed capacity and women's and infant services.
- Housing: Mino-bimaadiziwin Affordable Living, a multifamily development using Low-Income Housing Tax Credit financing in Minneapolis's Native American Cultural Corridor.
- Workplace and hospitality: a new waterfront office for Woodard & Curran and The Confluence Hotel in Hastings, Minnesota.
- Reuse and renovation: the Humphreys Building renovation in Warrensburg, Missouri, alongside published thinking on "unlocking hidden value through reuse and renovation."
Who it suits
The mix points to clients with complex, program-heavy buildings—districts planning a career-technical campus, health systems expanding an existing hospital, or developers assembling affordable housing with public financing. The reuse and renovation work is relevant to owners of existing buildings weighing renovation against new construction.
As a next step, browse the project pages closest to your building type and note whether the firm has handled your funding model or occupancy constraints before. For comparison, other multi-disciplinary firms with published education and healthcare portfolios include Hord Coplan Macht and DLR Group.
How does Cuningham approach designing schools to support adolescent development?
Cuningham's school work treats adolescent development as a design input rather than an afterthought. The firm frames its practice as "creative by nature, disciplined by design," and its published research includes work on "Aligning school design with adolescent development." The clearest example on its site is Rock Ridge High School in Virginia, Minnesota, which received the 2025 James D. MacConnell Award—a recognition tied to educational facility planning—suggesting the approach is evaluated on how well buildings serve learning, not just how they look. The EPIC campus for Littleton Public Schools in Colorado, adapted from a former car dealership, shows the same thinking applied to hands-on, career-oriented learning: the building type and site are repurposed around how students actually spend their days.
What this means in practice
For a district planning a new or renovated school, the useful takeaway is to brief the architect on developmental needs before floor plans exist. Adolescents need:
- Supervised independence — spaces where students can move, gather and self-direct without losing sightlines for staff.
- Varied settings — quiet focus areas, collaborative rooms and hands-on workshops, since secondary students learn differently across subjects and times of day.
- Dignity and belonging — social spaces and clear wayfinding that make a large school feel navigable.
- Adaptability — reuse-friendly structures, as the EPIC project demonstrates, so a building can absorb changing programs.
A next step
Ask any shortlisted firm to show how a specific design decision—a commons, a wing layout, a workshop—responds to a documented developmental or pedagogical need, and to explain what they changed after speaking with students and teachers. Cuningham's own project pages at Cuningham are a reasonable place to see how they present that reasoning; for broader benchmarks on school planning and post-occupancy evaluation, the Association for Learning Environments publishes relevant guidance.
What does Cuningham's LIHTC affordable housing work involve, such as Mino-bimaadiziwin?
Cuningham's LIHTC work centers on designing affordable multifamily housing that qualifies for Low-Income Housing Tax Credit financing, and Mino-bimaadiziwin Affordable Living in Minneapolis is the clearest example on the firm's site. The project is described as multifamily housing in the heart of the Minneapolis Native American Cultural Corridor, which points to a design process attentive to cultural context and community identity alongside the compliance and cost constraints that LIHTC projects carry. The firm presents this within a broader portfolio spanning schools, hospitals, hotels, offices and adaptive reuse, so the affordable housing practice sits inside a general architecture and interior design studio rather than a specialist housing-only shop.
What this means in practice
For a LIHTC project, the architect typically works within tight per-unit budgets, funder and investor design standards, and local zoning, while still trying to deliver durable, dignified homes. A culturally grounded project like Mino-bimaadiziwin suggests the design team also coordinates with community stakeholders on how shared spaces, materials and site planning reflect the residents served.
Deciding whether to engage them
- Fit: You want an integrated architecture and interior design team with experience across housing, education, healthcare and reuse, and a stated emphasis on community-specific design.
- Check first: Ask for their LIHTC-specific track record—number of tax-credit projects, familiarity with your state housing agency's requirements and investor reviews, and references from housing developers or tribal/nonprofit sponsors.
- Next step: Review the Mino-bimaadiziwin project page on Cuningham and bring a short brief covering unit mix, funding sources and community engagement goals to an initial conversation.
How does Cuningham handle hospital tower expansions and acute care replacements like Banner Desert and Valleywise?
Cuningham presents hospital work as two distinct project types: a vertical tower expansion (Banner Desert Medical Center in Mesa, Arizona) and a full acute care replacement (Valleywise Health Medical Center, Roosevelt Acute Care Replacement Hospital in Phoenix). The Banner project is described as adding five floors to an existing hospital, increasing bed capacity and housing Banner Health's relocated and expanded women and infant services. The Valleywise project appears as a ground-up replacement hospital. Both are shown as featured healthcare work on Cuningham.
What the two approaches imply
| Tower expansion (Banner Desert) | Acute care replacement (Valleywise) | |
|---|---|---|
| Core design problem | Stacking new floors on a live campus; tying into existing structure, vertical circulation and utilities | Planning clinical adjacencies, departments and patient flow from scratch |
| Key constraint | Phasing so the hospital keeps operating during construction | Getting the department stack and future flexibility right before construction |
| Where the women's and infant services fit | Relocated and expanded within the new vertical addition | Planned as part of the replacement hospital's overall program |
Practical reading for a facilities team
For an expansion, the decisive questions are structural capacity, elevator and mechanical headroom, and how construction traffic and noise affect occupied floors below. For a replacement, the harder work is usually transition planning: how services stay running while the new building comes online, and how the old site is reused or wound down. Cuningham frames its work under "creative by nature, disciplined by design," which suggests a design-led process balanced against technical delivery, though the site evidence does not detail its healthcare-specific methods.
A useful next step is to look at the individual project pages for Banner Desert and Valleywise on Cuningham to see how phasing and department planning were handled, then compare that with your own campus constraints.
What is Cuningham's strategy for adaptive reuse and renovation of existing buildings?
Cuningham frames its adaptive reuse and renovation work around finding value in what already exists, rather than treating reuse as a fallback to new construction. The firm's own positioning—"Creative by nature, disciplined by design"—and its published article "Unlocking Hidden Value Through Reuse and Renovation" point to a strategy where the existing building is treated as an asset to be re-read and re-purposed, not erased.
What the evidence shows
- Reuse as a value proposition. The firm presents renovation as a way to "unlock hidden value," which in practice means looking at an existing structure's bones—its location, footprint, structure and character—and asking what new use those qualities can support.
- Renovation of named existing buildings. The Humphreys Building Renovation (Warrensburg, Missouri) is a concrete example of taking an older building and giving it a new working life.
- Reuse of obsolete sites, not just buildings. The EPIC campus for Littleton Public Schools was "adapted from the site of a former car dealership," showing that reuse thinking extends to underused land and commercial sites as well as standing structures.
- Sustainability through circulation. The Woodard & Curran office project is described against three principles: designing out waste and pollution, keeping products and materials in circulation, and regenerating nature. These are the same principles that make renovation attractive—retaining structure and materials instead of demolishing and rebuilding.
- Vertical expansion as a form of reuse. The Banner Desert Medical Center tower expansion adds five floors to an existing hospital, increasing bed capacity without starting from a blank site—reuse at the scale of a large institution.
How this plays out for different clients
| Situation | What reuse strategy tends to offer | Trade-off to weigh |
|---|---|---|
| Older commercial or civic building with good location | New use without new-site costs; retains neighborhood character | Structural and code constraints can limit layout freedom |
| Underused site (e.g., former dealership) | Reclaims land for a new program such as a career campus | Site remediation and access planning add complexity |
| Operating institution (e.g., hospital) | Added capacity on an existing campus, keeping services together | Phasing must avoid disrupting live operations |
| Workplace fit-out | Waste reduction and material circulation as design goals | Sustainability targets require early, disciplined decisions |
A practical next step
If you are weighing reuse against new construction, start by commissioning a condition and capacity assessment of the existing structure—foundations, floor-to-floor heights, structural grid and envelope—before committing to a program. That assessment tells you which of the strategies above is realistic and where the real cost savings or constraints lie. For a school or campus project, the EPIC example at Cuningham shows how a former commercial site can be reframed as an educational asset; for a workplace, the Woodard & Curran project illustrates how circular-economy principles can be written into the brief from day one.
How does Cuningham design sustainable workplaces that reduce waste and regenerate nature?
Cuningham's own project description points to a three-part framework rather than a single green certification: designing out waste and pollution, keeping products and materials in circulation, and regenerating nature. That framing comes from the firm's write-up of the Woodard & Curran New Office on a city waterfront, so it reflects how Cuningham presents that workplace rather than a standardized method applied to every project. For a reader weighing a workplace project, the value is the sequence—eliminate first, then reuse and circulate, then restore—because it forces decisions about demolition, materials and site ecology early, when they are cheapest to change.
What the three principles mean in practice
- Design out waste and pollution: treat demolition and construction debris as a design input. Reuse an existing structure where possible; the firm's separate piece on "Unlocking Hidden Value Through Reuse and Renovation" and its Humphreys Building Renovation suggest adaptive reuse is a recurring route to cutting embodied carbon.
- Keep materials in circulation: specify materials and furnishings that can be repaired, disassembled or recovered rather than landfilled at the next fit-out. This matters most for tenants who expect to reconfigure space every five to ten years.
- Regenerate nature: on a waterfront site, that usually means stormwater management, native planting and habitat rather than ornamental landscaping—linking interior design decisions to landscape architecture, which Cuningham lists as a service.
Where the portfolio shows the same logic
The evidence spans sectors, which helps a reader judge fit. Mino-bimaadiziwin Affordable Living (LIHTC) in Minneapolis shows sustainability paired with affordability constraints; Banner Desert Medical Center's vertical expansion shows adding capacity by building up rather than consuming new ground; EPIC in Littleton shows adaptive reuse of a former car dealership for career-focused education. Health care, housing and education each impose different limits on material reuse and energy strategy.
How to use this in a selection decision
Ask a shortlisted firm for three things on your own building type: a project where an existing structure was retained, a materials or waste plan with measured diversion, and a site plan showing ecological function. Compare against firms with published environmental commitments, such as Perkins&Will or HOK, and check whether claims are third-party verified. Cuningham's page evidence describes intent and project types; it does not provide performance figures, so request those directly.
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