The man who designed the Harvey B. Gantt Center will soon be the subject of a Gantt Center exhibition.
Phil Freelon died in 2019 but left an architectural legacy.
In addition to The Gantt, his body of work includes:
- the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C.
- the National Center for Civil and Human Rights in Atlanta
- the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco
- Emancipation Park in Houston, and
- the forthcoming North Carolina Freedom Park in Raleigh.
Freelon was known for saying that architecture should be more than a container, that it should help tell the story of and be integral to the content of public institutions.
His Gantt Center design, for example, tells the story of Charlotte’s once-thriving Brooklyn community, which was razed in the 1960s.
Gantt Center President and CEO called the design “genius.”
The exhibition — “Container/Contained: Phil Freelon – Design Strategies for Telling African American Stories” — was created by faculty and students in the UNC Charlotte School of Architecture.
It will be on display at the Gantt Center Oct. 29 – Jan. 17. It then travels to Raleigh for a Feb. 6 opening at the North Carolina Museum of Art.
