Phil Freelon

Phillip Goodwin Freelon was born on the twenty-sixth of March 1953 at Philadelphia, the son of Phillip Freelon Sr. — a sales executive at the Sealtest Dairy of Philadelphia — and Elizabeth Freelon, a public-school teacher. His grandfather Allan Randall Freelon Sr. (1895–1960) was a Harlem Renaissance painter and one of the first African American art teachers of the Philadelphia public schools.

He was raised in the Black middle-class Philadelphia of the post-war period and educated at the Central High School at Philadelphia. He enrolled in 1971 at the Hampton Institute and transferred at the end of his sophomore year to the North Carolina State University School of Design at Raleigh, completing the Bachelor of Environmental Design there in 1975. He took the Master of Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1977 under Maurice Smith.

He was hired in 1977 by O’Brien Atkins Associates at Research Triangle Park, North Carolina and rose to vice-president of design for the firm by 1986. He left O’Brien Atkins in 1990 to found the Freelon Group at Durham, North Carolina — the principal Black-owned architectural firm of the American South of the 1990s and the 2000s.

He was elected in 1997 a Loeb Fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

He led the Freelon Group through the design of the Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History and Culture at Baltimore (2005), the Anacostia Community Museum at Washington, D.C. (2003), the Mary McLeod Bethune Council House and National Park Service Visitor Center at Washington (2010), the Center for Civil and Human Rights at Atlanta (2014), and over thirty further principal Black-historical and Black-institutional buildings.

He was named in 2009 the lead architect — at the head of the consortium of the Freelon Adjaye Bond/SmithGroup — of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture on the National Mall at Washington. The Museum opened to the public on the twenty-fourth of September 2016 and is the only national museum of the United States dedicated to African American history and culture.

He merged the Freelon Group in 2014 into Perkins+Will and served as managing director of the firm’s North Carolina practice.

He died at Durham, North Carolina on the ninth of July 2019 of complications of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, at sixty-six.

He is honored here as the lead architect of the National Museum of African American History and Culture.