MMD's Michael Marshall Featured in Hospitality Magazine

"The Urbanist: Michael Marshall"
Article excerpt reprinted from hospitalitydesign.com, July 15, 2024

Like many architects, Michael Marshall loved drawing as a kid, but he didn’t realize until first grade that he might have more talent than others. “[I noticed] some of the older kids would watch me,” he recalls. “I had relatives who would ask for my drawings to show their friends. That’s what got me into art and design.”

Marshall grew up in, and right outside, of Washington, DC after his parents moved there from Southern Virginia. He was 11 years old when found out that being an architect was even a job. Outside playing with a friend one summer, the other kid had to go home to retrieve blueprints his dad, a carpenter, had forgotten to bring to the jobsite. Marshall inquired about the roll. “He said, ‘These are the drawings the architect does so my dad can build the house he’s working on.’ I thought, ‘I like to draw. Maybe that’s what I’ll be.’”

Marshall continued drawing, even taking drafting classes in junior high. His teachers all knew he wanted to be an architect, Marshall remembers, “but by the time I finished school, (my parents were not very well-educated) no one had given me the pathway to college.” He spent the first summer after high school cleaning cars at a dealership, where he heard a radio commercial for a local junior college program for architectural engineering technology. He enrolled for the fall.

Marshall earned an associate’s degree from what would become the University of the District of Columbia, where the instruction focused on the skills needed for entry level architecture work. Transferring to the Catholic University of America, also in DC, Marshall spent a summer abroad, where Italian piazzas sparked his interest in urbanism. “The Campo de’ Fiori in Rome gave me a sense of cities that understood public spaces,” he says. “In the morning, it was an open-air market; kids played soccer there at noon; and the restaurants spill out into the space at night. It was enlightening.”

At Yale for his master’s degree in the early 1980s, Marshall (then the only Black student in the entire school of architecture) studied under world-famous architects including Frank Gehry and James Sterling.

Following stints at architecture and design firms and a grant that afforded him another year in Italy, Marshall returned to DC and started his own practice. Initially focused on single-family residences, he soon fostered relationships with local developers, some of whom were part of public-private partnerships to redevelop sites the DC government controlled into mixed-use properties, adding needed density in the city. The endeavor paired small local companies with larger architectural firms. The City Vista apartment complex, for example, joined Michael Marshall Design (MMD) and Torti-Gallas + Partners for a complex built on the site of DC’s former National Historical Wax Museum.

A transition from single- to multifamily architecture was pivotal. “There weren’t many minorities in our profession,” Marshall says. “Coming with a perspective and background that is not the average—especially to neighborhood development where communities had been wiped out in the name of urban renewal—I could be that voice and understand what community members are feeling.”

Today, MMD operates in many segments, from public schools to sports and mixed-use projects. The firm’s current redevelopment of the Frank D. Reeves Center on the U Street corridor—a historic cultural hub for African American DC residents dubbed “Black Broadway”—will include office space for the NAACP and others, a 116-key hotel, a restaurant from chef Carla Hall, and an Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and School.

Marshall maintains his focus on the intersection of design, planning, and community. Given that in the next 50 years, roughly 75 percent of the world’s population will live in cities, he says, “I’m a proponent of bringing diversity to our practice. Those of us who have the training and education are going to have to be the mediators. Everyone’s going to bring their culture to the table, and somehow this has all got to fit together.”

This article originally appeared in HD’s July 2024 issue.

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