Architecture & Design – Destination Crenshaw

Learn about the architects and designers who shaped Destination Crenshaw. This is architecture built not just from materials, but from meaning.

The Visionary Behind the Design

Zena Howard, FAIA, LEED AP | Principal and Global Cultural & Civic Practice Leader, Perkins&Will | Full Bio

For Zena Howard, architecture has always been more than form and function, it’s narrative. It’s memory made visible. Across her celebrated career, from the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture to the Motown Museum and the National Center for Civil and Human Rights, she has treated design as a language for history, resilience, and beauty.

Before joining forces with Perkins&Will, Phil Freelon founded The Freelon Group, a trailblazing Black-owned architecture firm that reshaped the cultural landscape industry. Renowned for its civic and museum projects, the firm became synonymous with designing spaces that gave voice to history, often working in Black communities scarred by disinvestment and urban renewal, transforming loss into legacy through design.

When Zena learned about Destination Crenshaw, she saw something extraordinary: a Black community that hadn’t been erased, but endured. Crenshaw was still here, vibrant, rooted, and ready to define its own narrative. To her, that was revolutionary.

That philosophy guided her work on Destination Crenshaw. When she was brought on to envision the project, she saw more than a transportation corridor. She saw an opportunity to elevate a community’s story into the skyline of Los Angeles. Zena imagined an environment where art, landscape, and structure exist in harmony, where the architecture itself becomes a canvas for the culture it celebrates.

Zena, as lead architect, anchored the project in a unifying narrative, one that honors the lineage, artistry, and innovation of Black Los Angeles.

She poured her brilliance into every detail, from the rhythm of the landscape to the texture of the materials, ensuring that Destination Crenshaw would not just be about the community, but of it. The result is more than design; it’s storytelling through space. A living, breathing testament to what architecture can do when it listens, and when it loves the people it’s built for.

The Build

Spanning 1.3 miles along Crenshaw Boulevard, Destination Crenshaw is a series of parks, art spaces, and gathering places celebrating the culture, creativity, and history of Black Los Angeles, a living corridor honoring the past and shaping the future.

The Build

About the Managing Principal

Gabrielle Bullock | Full Bio

Gabrielle Bullock builds with clarity. Every line, every decision, carries intention. Over more than three decades, she has led some of the most complex architectural undertakings in the world, guiding them from concept to completion with a calm authority that commands trust.

At Perkins&Will, where she is a Principal and the firm’s Director of Global Diversity, Gabrielle has shaped projects of extraordinary scale and purpose, from the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, one of the largest hospital builds in California, to international healthcare and civic developments that demand equal measures of design sensitivity and technical precision.

Drake Dillard

Senior Project Manager

Malcolm Davis

Senior Project Manager

Yan Krymsky

Design

Destination Crenshaw Community Advisory Council

James Burk
jill moniz
Jorge Peniche
V. Joy Simmons, MD
Judith Baca
Karen Mack
Kohshin Finley
Larry Earl

Adam Ayala
Alberto Retana
Allison Agsten
Archer One
Ben Caldwell
Darnell Hunt
Drake Dillard
Felicia Filer

Leroy Hamilton
Mandla Kayise
Mark Greenfield
Naima Keith
Ron Finley
Tafarai Bayne

The heart of Destination Crenshaw beats with community vision.

This collective of artists, curators, planners, historians, and organizers worked alongside the architects to shape every detail of the project.

Over two years of design charrettes, they infused purpose and artistry into the plan, turning Crenshaw Boulevard into a living work of art created by the community it celebrates.

The Unifying narrative

A Unifying Narrative

At the heart of their design lies a unifying symbol: a soaring, modern representation of the African Giant Star Grass. During the transatlantic slave trade, this plant was used as bedding in the holds of slave ships, and when those ships reached new shores, the grass took root and grew. For Zena and Phil, this became the soul of Destination Crenshaw: a metaphor for resilience, rebirth, and the ability to thrive wherever you are planted.