McKissack & McKissack

McKissack & McKissack is a Washington, D.C. architecture, engineering and construction management firm founded in 1990 by Deryl McKissack, a descendant of one of the oldest African American owned design and construction practices in the country. The firm works mostly as program manager, construction manager and owner’s representative on institutional, transportation and civic capital programs, with offices in Washington, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Baltimore. It is leading construction on Metropolitan Park, the $8.1 billion Hard Rock casino, hotel and entertainment complex being built on 50 acres of city-owned parking beside Citi Field in Queens. Other work spans federal buildings, airports, transit systems, university campuses and public school modernization programs.

McKissack & McKissack traces back to 1905, when Moses McKissack III and his brother Calvin opened an architecture and engineering practice in Nashville — grandsons of a slave named Moses McKissack who had learned the building trade from the man who enslaved him. Calvin and Moses II became registered architects in Tennessee in 1922, among the first licensed Black architects in the Southeast, and in 1942 the firm won a $5.7 million federal contract to build the 99th Pursuit Squadron Airbase in Tuskegee, Alabama — at the time the largest federal contract ever awarded to an African American-owned firm.

Deryl McKissack, the fifth generation of the family in the building trade, launched the present-day McKissack & McKissack in Washington, D.C. in 1990 as a sole entrepreneur working with limited financial resources. The firm now manages more than $15 billion in construction programs, has been ranked a Top 100 Construction Management-for-Fee firm by Engineering News-Record, and marked its 35th anniversary in 2025.

Beyond its Washington headquarters, McKissack keeps offices in Baltimore, Chicago, Dallas and the Los Angeles area. In 2020 it became the first African American-owned and woman-owned firm selected as a prime contractor by the City of Fort Worth, Texas, in two contract categories.

Its design and program-management credits include the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, the design-build joint venture behind the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial, and Cedar Hill Regional Medical Center, featured on the cover of Medical Construction and Design magazine. In 2023 the firm secured what it calls the largest program-management engagement in its history: a multi-year contract to rebuild and modernize 23 schools across St. Croix and St. Thomas/St. John for the U.S. Virgin Islands Department of Education.

The firm’s advisory board draws from finance, architecture and consulting — including former Channing Capital Management CEO Eric McKissack and Design Futures Council president James P. Cramer — and its community commitments include the Trust for the National Mall, Living Classrooms, the ACE Mentor Program, the National Council of Negro Women and Martha’s Table.