Press Releases August 20, 2025

Perkins&Will Announces Winners of 2025 Phil Freelon Design Competition

Annual ideas competition invites teams from the firm’s global studios to reimagine everyday spaces that improve public health outcomes through design.

A collage-style render of an open sky cafe

"Beyond Necessity"

Abubakr Bajaman, Miucci Yung, Emily Chee, and Chuhan Zhao

Washington, D.C.—Perkins&Will has announced the winners of its annual Phil Freelon Design Competition, an internal contest named in honor of the late architect and former design director Phil Freelon. The competition celebrates design’s potential to advance equity, dignity, and well-being. Each year, it invites the firm’s interdisciplinary teams to respond to a pressing societal issue through the lens of design innovation.

For the 2025 competition, teams from across the firm’s global studios were tasked with “hacking” everyday spaces—like parking lots, strip malls, libraries, or community centers—and transforming them into catalysts for health and well-being. Rather than designing new buildings, participants were encouraged to reimagine existing, often overlooked typologies around them and explore how these spaces could support healthier behaviors, foster connection, and expand access to care. The goal: to push healthcare design beyond clinical settings and into the spaces where people already live, learn, and move.

“We designed this challenge to look ahead—to imagine the kinds of spaces health will demand in the future,” says Casey Jones, chief design officer at Perkins&Will. “By removing conventional constraints—no assigned site, no fixed typology—we encouraged teams to prototype bold, adaptive interventions that anticipate where care can and should happen next.”

a render of a wood canopied building overlooking a lake

"Bathing Culture"

Kazuaki Kojima and Nick Mason

A Global Call to Rethink Health Spaces

This year’s design prototypes explored health holistically—physical, emotional, and social dimensions. Projects ranged from a wellness hub in a former shopping mall to public infrastructure adapted for community care—each tailored to the specific challenges and opportunities of its local environment, reflecting a global appetite for place-based health innovation. The prompt focused on identifying real-world spaces in need of transformation and developing creative, practical solutions to support healthier living. Instead of concentrating on hospitals or clinics, teams reimagined how non-clinical environments—such as transit stops, schools, markets, or housing—might be leveraged to promote public health. Emphasis was placed on ideas that are scalable, adaptable, and grounded in everyday experience.

“Most of our health is shaped long before we walk into a doctor’s office,” says Marie Henson, Perkins&Will’s global health practice leader. “This competition helps us push our thinking about where and how care can happen—and how design can play a more proactive role in shaping it.”

A multidisciplinary jury of design leaders, healthcare experts, and civic thinkers evaluated entries based on creativity, clarity, feasibility, and potential for impact.

“Perkins&Will’s work was creative, illuminating, and richly resolved,” says juror Michael Murphy. “It was a privilege to peer into the inner workings of such innovative designers.”

The jury selected the following projects as this year’s winners.

First Place

Rx Strip Mall: 200mg

A vibrant reimagining of the aging American strip mall as a joy-filled wellness destination, this project transforms an everyday commercial landscape into a community-centered space for health. Drawing from the typology’s original promise—making life easier—the Washington, D.C.-based team repositions the strip mall as a vehicle for making life healthier. Targeting real public health challenges like asthma, obesity, and mental distress in Prince George’s County, Maryland, the design deploys a series of modular kiosks, pavilions, and outdoor furnishings—each based on the footprint of a parking space—that invite movement, connection, and care.

Judges praised the project’s use of humor and graphic storytelling, noting how it made health feel approachable, social, and fun—without losing sight of scale or strategy. With more than 68,000 strip malls across the U.S., the proposal is not only wildly imaginative, but deeply scalable.

"Rx Strip Mall: 200mg"

Anne-Philippe Kakou, Felipe Florentino, Samuel Orlando, and Joseph McKenley

an axon drawing of a reworked strip mall

"FLOURISH"

Joe Wilfong, Corey Phelps, Joshua Gripton, and Luke Christensen

Second Place

Flourish

A vibrant reimagining of the school playground as a nature- and food-based health hub. FLOURISH transforms an underused, heat-exposed site in Magnolia Park Houston, at Franklin Elementary, into a dynamic space for play, gardening, and communal eating—blurring the lines between learning and wellbeing. Judges appreciated its seasonal programming, community integration, and its bold departure from rigid education models.

Third Place

Parkitecture

A restrained yet powerful reimagining of a Dallas parking garage, PARKITECTURE introduces a phased system of modular add-ons—like health kiosks, mini sports courts, green planting areas, and coworking spaces—to improve community wellness. By targeting outer garage areas that receive natural light, and planning for future conversion of interior space, the proposal responds to evolving urban needs and declining parking demand. Judges admired its pragmatic, scalable approach to transforming underutilized infrastructure into health-generating community assets.

a black and white render of a cityscape with yellow tress overlaid over a parking garage.

"PARKITECTURE"

Junye Zhou, Jeremy Cheng, Carven Chen, and Dahan Xiong

Honorable mentions included projects titled Beyond Necessity, Formicaria, A Community Health Hub, and Bathing Culture—each offering a distinct lens on healing and care across diverse geographies and cultural contexts.

an exterior render of a campus in a tropical setting.

"A Community Health Hub"

Josh Fisher, Trevor Butler, and Juan Rovalo

Common Themes: Intergenerational Design, Climate Adaptation, and Repurposing the Everyday

Despite the diversity of contexts, many projects converged around shared ideas: reclaiming public infrastructure for community wellness; integrating food, play, and care into civic life; and using nature-based strategies to combat isolation and stress.

Intergenerational programming, climate-responsive materials, and adaptive reuse of car-centric spaces emerged as dominant themes, reflecting a broader shift toward preventative health as both a design strategy and a policy imperative.

Insights That Inform Practice

The competition serves as a design laboratory for Perkins&Will, whose health practice spans hospitals, community clinics, research institutions, and public health initiatives worldwide. By embracing speculative, fast-cycle prototyping, the firm aims to surface insights that strengthen and diversify its approach to care.

“These ideas don’t replace our healthcare work—they expand it,” says Henson. “We’re using what we’ve learned to think more holistically, from hospitals to neighborhoods, and everywhere in between.”

Health, Everywhere for Everyone

To accompany the competition, Perkins&Will developed the “Health, Everywhere for Everyone” white paper, offering a transparent look at the thinking behind this year’s brief, the insights drawn from all submissions, and the framework that emerged from the firm’s analysis.

The brief’s focus on health also honors Robin Guenther, one of Perkins&Will’s principals and a global leader in sustainable healthcare design, who passed away from cancer in May 2023. In the spirit of her lifelong advocacy for health, prevention, and open knowledge-sharing, the paper explains the reasoning behind the competition’s structure, highlights recurring themes across global entries, and distills them into an actionable design framework.

By making this work public, Perkins&Will aims to advance the conversation on embedding health into everyday spaces and to inspire designers, public health leaders, and policymakers to act—together and now.

Read the full report.

###

About Perkins&Will

Perkins&Will, an interdisciplinary, research-based architecture and design firm, was founded in 1935 on the belief that design has the power to transform lives. The firm is committed to creating a better, beautiful, more equitable world through Living Design, an approach that integrates environmental, social, and design considerations to advance ecological health and well-being. Interior Design named Perkins&Will a “Sustainability Giant” in 2024; Architizer named it the world’s “Best Sustainable Firm” in 2023; and Metropolis named it “Firm of the Year” in 2022 for its industry leadership in advancing climate action and social justice. Fast Company named Perkins&Will one of the World’s Most Innovative Companies in Architecture three times, and in 2021, it added the firm to its list of Brands That Matter—making Perkins&Will the first architecture practice in the world to earn the distinction.

With an international team of more than 2,500 professionals, Perkins&Will has over 30 studios worldwide, providing integrated services in architecture, interior design, branded environments, urban design, and landscape architecture. Partners include Schmidt Hammer Lassen Architects; McLennan Design; Portland; Nelson\Nygaard; and Pierre-Yves Rochon (PYR). For more information, visit www.perkinswill.com.

Perkins&Will Announces Winners of 2025 Phil Freelon Design Competition

Related Content