Philip G. Freelon, FAIA, was the founder of The Freelon Group, an architecture firm based in Durham, North Carolina that focused on higher education, science and technology, and museum and cultural center projects and that merged with Perkins+Will in 2014. Since its establishment in 1990, the firm completed major museum projects in Baltimore, San Francisco, and Charlotte; the joint-venture design team of Freelon Adjaye Bond was selected by the Smithsonian Institution to design the new National Museum of African American History and Culture on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. Mr. Freelon's work received dozens of AIA design awards at the national, regional, and state levels, and was published in national professional journals including Architecture, Progressive Architecture, Architectural Record, and Contract magazine which named him Designer of the Year in 2008. The Freelon Group received AIA North Carolina's Outstanding Firm Award in 2001.
Mr. Freelon served as an adjunct professor at North Carolina State University and was a visiting critic and lecturer at Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the University of Maryland, Syracuse University, Kent State University, the University of Cincinnati, and the Catholic University of America; he was also on the faculty at MIT's School of Architecture and Planning. A native of Philadelphia, Mr. Freelon earned the degrees of Bachelor of Environmental Design from North Carolina State University's College of Design and Master of Architecture from MIT. In 1989, he was awarded the Loeb Fellowship for independent study at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. Mr. Freelon was named a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects in 2003. He was the 2009 recipient of the National AIA Thomas Jefferson Award for Public Architecture and the 2010 recipient of AIA North Carolina's Gold Medal.