Commonly known as "LaFortune" or "LaFun," it is a 4-story building of 83,000 square feet[3] that provides the Notre Dame community with a meeting place for social, recreational, cultural, and educational activities.

Architecturally, it was designed in an eclectic mixture of French Second Empire style and Neo Romanesque with some neoclassical elements such as Ionic columns of the little portico and a somewhat classical cornice with a dentil course below the soffit.

The rest of the second floor contained lecture rooms for the geology and mineralogy on the south side and of those for botany, physiology, and zoology on the north.

[10] In 1924 architecture professors Vincent Fagan and Francis Kervick designed an addition to the east side of the building and construction started in June, with the project completed in time for the opening of classes in the fall.

[13] In the mid-1930s, Notre Dame built its first particle accelerator in the basement of Cushing Hall, but this instrument was not powerful enough and the university contracted to purchase an eight-million-volt machine in 1940.

When installed, it was the largest particle accelerator built to date and it was on-line by the time the United States entered World War II.