About SmithGroup
SmithGroup is one of the world’s preeminent integrated design firms, and one of the most prominent museum design and planning firms in the United States. SmithGroup's cultural experts are known for designing dynamic, engaging spaces that enhance community identities and enrich visitor experiences. As a holistic integrated architecture and engineering practice of architects, planners, historians, interpretive designers, and preservation specialists dedicated to shaping museums and cultural spaces, they specialize in creating places that honor history, elevate community voices, and foster meaningful connection.
SmithGroup's networked team of cultural designers specializes exclusively in the planning and design of museums, archives and collections facilities, visitor centers, children's museums, science centers, university arts education environments, performing arts facilities, historic structures and cultural landscapes. For more than a half century, SmithGroup has delivered award-winning museum projects for some of the world's most iconic places and important institutions, including: Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture, Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Wisconsin History Center, The Sixth Floor Museum, Gilcrease Museum, and Capital Jewish Museum. As a leading voice in planning and design for cultural institutions, SmithGroup has authored the definitive guide to the museum project journey, Building a Museum: This is Not a Manual, detailing best practices for the complex process of planning, designing and constructing a museum.
SmithGroup's team for the planning of Juneteenth's Home are leaders in planning and design for sites of trauma, resilience, and African American history, including the National Museum of African American History and Culture, a comprehensive master plan for Whitney Plantation, National Slavery Museum at Lumpkin’s Slave Jail, and City of Alexandria Freedom House.
Dayton Schroeter, AIA, NOMA, SEGD
Architectural and Master Plan Design Lead for Juneteenth's Home
Dayton is an ancient futurist, bridging the gaps between past and future to offer a visionary language of justice and reconciliation. A Vice President and Design Director at SmithGroup, he is an award-winning architect with more than 25 years of experience leading the planning and design of museums, memorials, cultural landscapes, and civic destinations across the United States. As the Architectural and Master Plan Design Lead for Juneteenth's Home, he is helping guide a vision that honors Galveston's pivotal role in the American freedom story while creating new opportunities for learning, reflection, and community connection.
His work includes nationally significant cultural projects such as the National Slavery Museum in Richmond, Virginia, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Expansion and Renovation, Freedom House Museum, Whitney Plantation, and other institutions that transform collective memory into new possibilities for the future.
For Dayton, "architecture begins with listening. Through the stories communities share, memory becomes meaning and meaning becomes possibility." That perspective informs his work at the intersections of memory, identity, trauma, and resilience, where storytelling, strategic visioning, and design become tools for engagement, reflection, and transformation.
Beyond practice, he contributes to national conversations on museums, memorialization, public memory, and social justice through publications, public speaking, mentorship, and professional leadership, including contributions to Museums and Mass Violence and Empty Pedestals. His work seeks not only to acknowledge the past, but to transform historical understanding into opportunities for healing, reflection, and collective action—helping communities honor their histories while imagining more just and inclusive futures.
William Trotty, AIA
Project Manager/Local Architect
Native Houstonian William has built his architecture career locally and is a passionate advocate for bettering communities in southeast Texas. He is an architect and seasoned project manager at SmithGroup where he directs institutional projects that embody the convergence of education and community service, such as the new UH Medical Research Building in Houston, which is designed to expand community health education programs and improve access to care in a high-demand region of Texas. William is the project manager for the master plan for Juneteenth’s Home, supervising the project team’s progress as planning for its future progresses. Since his youth, William has been involved with the Rutherford B.H. Yates Museum, in the historic Freedman’s Town neighborhood; an interdisciplinary group working to preserve one of the largest extant Freedmen’s Towns in the country. William’s early work with the Yates Museum fostered his love of adaptive reuse projects, nurturing his understanding of how powerful the reclamation of buildings, sites and stories held in collective memory can be in cementing the history and triumphs of communities. Today, he volunteers his time and talents to fundraising for two local arts communities: the Community Artists’ Collective, empowering local African American artists, and the School Art Auction for the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo School Art Program, supporting PreK-12 student artists throughout southeast Texas.
Monteil Crawley, AIA, LEED AP
Museum Planning
Monteil is a leading expert in the planning and design of museums and cultural facilities of all kinds and is an author of the definitive guide to museum projects Building a Museum: This is Not a Manual. He is a senior principal at SmithGroup and has spent his career with the firm working on structures and places essential to the nation's history and culture, including the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture and the comprehensive plan for the Whitney Plantation. Monteil is the museum planner for the Juneteenth's Home master plan, leveraging a depth of expertise in museum architecture to steward a robust plan for its future longevity and relevance. Monteil recognizes the vital role that cultural institutions play in shaping our collective understanding of history and culture while recognizing how the narrative has been dominated by Eurocentric and Western perspectives. By fostering a platform for marginalized communities to share their stories, his work ensures that these spaces represent the diversity of human experience—ultimately leading to a more just and equitable society.
Kamille Hampton, NOMA
Museum & Interpretive Planning
Kamille defines herself as a storyteller of the built environment, with an obligation to reconnect hidden truths related to historical, environmental, social, and cultural contexts. She will lead museum and interpretive planning for the Juneteenth’s Home master plan. An architect and associate at SmithGroup, Kamille is a powerful designer, working on national cultural spaces that tell stories and engage, such as renovations within the National Museum of African American History & Culture, plans for the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, Ted Watkins Memorial Park in Los Angeles, and the Black Heritage Trail in Boston, and the interpretive design for the traveling exhibition The Culture: Hip Hop and Contemporary Art in the 21st Century. She approaches museum planning and interpretive design with the goal to enhance understanding of collective history through innovative placemaking, believing that by weaving narratives of place through interpretive understanding breathes life into the work and amplifies the stories of marginalized communities. Kamille is a skilled authority at engaging with stakeholders and the community to inform planning and design and particularly advocates for the necessity of including youth in the planning process.
Kendra Hyson
Landscape Planner
Kendra is an experienced and versatile urban planning and landscape architecture professional with a deep commitment to using design as a tool for social equity and climate justice. An urban planner, landscape architect and an associate at SmithGroup as well as a leader in its design justice initiatives, she will lend site and landscape intelligence to the master plan for Juneteenth's Home. Kendra crafts landscape design solutions that create a strong sense of place, yet maintain design functionality, creativity and clarity. She is passionate about community engagement and skilled at developing culturally sensitive community-based plans, such as the multi-award-winning comprehensive plan for Danville, Virginia addressing equity, health and climate resilience for the small town seeking to transform its history of economic strain and its divisive legacy. Outside of SmithGroup, Kendra leads Urban Studio, a nonprofit she co-founded supporting high school and university students of color to explore design as a tool for activism and transformation in the built environment.
Jim Shepherd, AIA, LEED AP, FAPT
Historic Preservation Lead
Jim has directed preservation research, planning and design for numerous places of national significance around the country, including many whose heritage embodies both trauma and resilience. He will lend preservation expertise to the master plan for Juneteenth's Home, identifying how preservation of structures, landscapes and lived experiences can help shape the future identity of this new cultural asset in Galveston. A vice president and director of historic preservation at SmithGroup, Jim is passionate about linking the past and the future by celebrating heritage, revitalizing communities, conserving resources and designing renovated spaces that are sensitive to their context. He has led preservation planning and architectural design for City of Alexandria’s Freedom House, and one of the few remaining Negro League ballparks Hamtramck Stadium in Detroit. By honoring our architectural heritage and providing innovative design within historic contexts, we create inspiring cultural spaces that enrich human experience.