Cooper Carry

Cooper Carry is an Atlanta architecture and planning firm founded in 1960, known for mixed-use, hospitality, higher-education, and workplace design across the eastern United States. The firm builds its practice around what it calls connective architecture, projects that stitch buildings into walkable districts rather than treating them as islands. Cooper Carry is the lead designer of the Cincinnati Downtown Marriott convention hotel, a 700-room tower anchoring the city’s Convention District. With offices in Atlanta, New York, and Washington, the firm works nationally on hotels, campus buildings, and large mixed-use developments where planning and architecture have to move together.

Cooper Carry was founded in 1960 by Jerry Cooper and Walter Carry, and more than six decades on it describes itself as a creative collective rather than a firm with a house style. The organizing idea is what it calls Connective Architecture: designing buildings and landscapes so indoor and outdoor experiences link together, with attention to solar orientation, daylighting and the way different building types meet at the street.

The practice is deliberately broad. Studio leaders specialize in hospitality, multifamily residential, office workplace, science and technology, higher education, K-12, retail, restaurants and bars, transit-oriented development and urban planning, and the firm treats the blurring of those categories as the point rather than a problem. Design services extend past architecture into interior design, landscape architecture, experiential graphic design, branding for the built environment, historic rehabilitation and sustainability consulting.

Cooper Carry has expanded its reach over time, acquiring The Johnson Studio in 2016 and 505Design in 2023, and now runs offices in Atlanta, Washington, DC, Charlotte and Boulder. The firm has also pursued a Just label from the International Living Future Institute as a public measure of its social-equity practices. Its Atlanta headquarters anchors the studio’s long history in the city.