Phil Freelon, museum architect

Phil Freelon, an architect who led a design team that gave shape to the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, which opened to critical acclaim on the National Mall in 2016 as a monument to black struggle and triumph, died July 9 at his home in Durham, N.C. He was 66.

He had complications from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, sometimes known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, said a son, Deen Freelon.

Since 1990, Freelon led an architectural firm in Durham that specialized in designing public buildings, including other cultural centers devoted to black life in Baltimore, Atlanta, Charlotte, San Francisco and Greensboro, N.C.

He led a consortium of several architectural firms — formally known as the Freelon Adjaye Bond/SmithGroup — that won the design competition for the National Museum of African History in 2009. The proposal was chosen, in a unanimous vote, over submissions from such renowned architects as Richard Meier, I.M. Pei and Norman Foster.

Freelon and the two other principal architects in the group, David Adjaye and Max Bond, were black. Bond died in 2009, just before the group won the competition.

Adjaye, born in Tanzania and raised in Ghana, was the lead designer. As lead architect, Freelon helped with the design and oversaw the technical aspects of the project, which included negotiating the thickets of bureaucratic Washington. Adjaye described him in 2010 as a “steady rock.”

Over a seven-year period, and at a cost of more than $500 million, Freelon and his group designed and built the 400,000-square-foot museum, which is adjacent to the Washington Monument. President Barack Obama was present for the museum’s groundbreaking in 2012 and when its doors opened four years later. Since then, nearly 5 million people have visited the museum.

New York Times architecture critic Michael Kimmelman pronounced it “the first really fine major public building of the century to rise in the nation’s capital.”

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