Krista Shepard

Photo Credit: Phil Soto

Advisory Board Member

Krista Shepherd has spent her entire quarter-century career as an architect with the same Phoenix firm with the opportunities to shape communities through challenging projects where great architecture and places matter most.

Whether the work involves the fragility of the Sonoran Desert, the challenge of reinventing a downtown transit station, or helping shape a future for the vulnerability of an historic community through which a 5-mile light-rail line has expanded, Shepherd is intrigued by it all.

“We take it seriously (their work),” said Shepherd, design principal at Multistudio, a multidisciplinary design studio with five offices in the U.S., including one in the Warehouse District south of downtown Phoenix. “And we try to spark imagination, not respond to what people are accustomed to seeing and building, but to talk about ‘What should it be? What could it be if we really work at it?’”

That commitment to building from imagination and listening to the constraints and voices of stakeholders — in this case, South Phoenix residents and business owners whose community will be changed forever by the $1.4-billion light-rail extension — made Shepherd an ideal person to become a founding partner of the South Central Collaborative (S.CC).

“She is one of the most talented architects and community leaders I know, and she is very generous in sharing her vast knowledge, expertise, and design talents with the Collaborative partners and communities throughout Arizona,” said Shannon Scutari, S.CC’s Executive Director. “She is incredibly hard working and devoted to doing the right thing even in the face of strong resistance from the status quo.”

A product of the Midwest

Shepherd grew up in northeast Ohio and originally aspired to be a marine biologist. Lacking an ocean in her home state, she took to making books with shark drawings and shark statistics, having inherited a talent for drawing from her mother. Shepherd thought graphic design might be a good career and practiced that as an intern and then worked for an architectural firm during high school.

She earned a bachelor’s degree in interior design from Kent State University, then got a job at an architectural and engineering firm.

“The old white men in the firm told me, ‘Stay in your lane and do your interior design thing, when I had architectural ideas. That was a great motivator for me to study architecture and earn a Master of Architecture at Arizona State University.”

“The thing that fascinated me about ASU at the time was that they had built a brand new shop with woodworking tools and we could make something on a large scale. At Multistudio, we work in multiple disciplines and create full-scale mockups and test them before we suggest to owners and contractors to build them.”

Following her graduation, Shepherd stayed in Arizona, not only because it meant an end to shoveling snow but because there was an exotic nature and things were moving here.

“There was incredible access in Phoenix and the ability to get involved in things that I would never have had the opportunity to do in Ohio was evident. I had access to doing much larger, more complicated, more interesting kinds of work in a collaborative environment.”

A Phoenix resident for almost 3 decades, Shepherd said she’s always been enthralled with the complexity and diversity of big cities. “They’re not vanilla or plain, they’re lived in. They have layers of people and history with time.”

When Multistudio decided to relocate its offices south of downtown from midtown, it was a collective determination by the studio rooted in a desire to be located in a place where transformation was possible.

Over her 25-year career Multistudio (formerly Gould Evans), she’s worked on projects with people she finds interesting and has had the ability to shape various communities. With a wide range of experience, leading Multistudio feeds Shepherd's appreciation for all the ways design impacts the physical environment.

Great responsibility demands great work, she said.

“When we design something, it ought to be worth it, valuable to the community that it serves, and endure over time so that people don’t want to tear it down - it can’t be an awful building, and it must serve in multiple ways.”

Because working imaginatively and pragmatically about what could be and listening to the voice of impacted stakeholders are important to Shepherd, being involved in the planning and urban design around the South Central Light Rail extension project was appealing.

A founding mother of the S.CC

Scutari saw a spark in Shepherd.

“Krista is a renowned designer who integrates community, context and sensitivity into all of her work, and always honors indigenous origination, principles, and practices,” she said. “She is trustworthy to the core.”

Shepherd is among the “founding mothers” of the South Central Collaborative, formed in 2016 to ensure the community’s voice and ideas were heard during the planning and construction of the light rail line. The S.CC will continue advocating for the community as residential and commercial development comes.

A former executive board member, now serving on the S.CC’s advisory board, Shepherd brought along her extensive experience and knowledge of architecture and mobility within communities. She was the co-chair of the Phoenix Community Alliance’s Multimodal Connectivity Committee for over 8 years, which develops initiatives boosting rail, bus, biking, walking, safe streets, and parking options affecting businesses and residents downtown. She was involved in the Sustainable Communities Collaborative, a partnership that, with funding from the Raza Development Fund and others, advocated for projects along metro Phoenix’s initial 20-mile light-rail corridor.

She and Scutari also share an interest in boundary-pushing conversations that “Try to figure out what people will say yes to, or always ask the question ‘Why not? Why is that not a way forward?’”

Finally, the South Central Corridor possesses social, environmental, political and architectural richness that she and Multistudio gravitate toward, she said.

“We are interested in helping amplify the voices in that community which already were saying that things should be different and can be different. They are incredibly creative and inventive, and spirited.”

Multistudio also led the community planning and extensive outreach with Promise Arizona to develop the South Central Transit Oriented Development (TOD) Community Vision and Plan, and the Rio PHX 2050 Vision Plan with the City of Phoenix that incorporated and expanded the South Central Community TOD Community Plan and Vision to consider the intersection of the natural infrastructure and open space of the Rio Salado.

“Multistudio and Promise Arizona (a faith-based nonprofit that trains leaders and volunteers to build power in their communities) really rallied people in the corridor to participate in this process and work together to shape what those public engagement opportunities would be.”

Shining examples of the S.CC’s successes include shaping the design of the South Central Light Rail project to create more pedestrian crossings than anywhere else on the light rail, she said. This important design element, initiated by the South Central Collaborative ensures more frequent pedestrian, walkable and bikeable connections between the rail and surrounding neighborhoods, Shepherd said.

“That makes a huge impact on the daily existence of people in the neighborhoods and throughout the community.”

The efforts have been robust and accomplishments many, Shepherd said, but the work is just beginning.

“Our firm doesn’t hold a contract anymore on the South Central TOD work, but we can’t leave it alone, either. We continue to participate, to build forward-action items that are necessary to support the vision that the community has put forward.”

Part-and-parcel of that vision is that incremental development of residential and commercial properties occurs without displacement of current residents - rather development is needed that raises opportunities and incomes of the people living there now, she said.

“It’s persistence and strength of vision,” she said of the S.CC. “Vision because it takes so many years, and it’s complicated to roll it out. Persistence, even though community members are tired of asking for things, which doesn’t stop them from showing up and asking again - that is motivating.”

A penchant for the unique

In 2023, Shepherd was named by Downtown Phoenix Inc., (a community-building organization working to advance downtown), as one of six women entrepreneurs shaping the area’s landscape.

Two examples: Under her leadership, Multistudio tackled the relocation of its offices to an historic paper distribution building in the Warehouse District. The firm’s offices have a large space, called “the living room of the Warehouse District,” used for workshops and meetings at no cost to the organizers.

Several years ago, Multistudio was drawn to a visionary but complicated idea to build a humane urban setting around the old transit hub in downtown Phoenix with two light rail stations.

Scheduled to open this year, Central Station is one million square feet of mixed-use development adjacent to Civic Space Park and ASU’s downtown Phoenix campus. It will offer student and multi-family housing in two towers, two levels of underground parking, and retail/office space, in addition to the City of Phoenix Transit Center (named for Congressman Greg Stanton).

“We’ll sign up for projects that are kind of distinctive in the making, but not just to build more of the same thing.”

Which brings us full circle to the South Central Light Rail project and subsequent future developments alongside it. Shepherd hopes the dreams of parents in the community — that their children will grow up in the corridor, live, work and someday prosper in their own homes — are fulfilled, that small businesses thrive, and that everyone has access to health care, fresh food and good education.

She wants South Phoenix culture to be preserved and recognized for the richness that is there when people from across the Valley ride the light rail into the community to enjoy great food, great art and great entertainment.

But also, Shepherd hopes that certain things don’t change too much - that which makes South Phoenix its own.

“In South Central Phoenix, when you walk down the sidewalk, kind of no matter who you are, people wave. They say, ‘Hello!’ It’s a friendly, welcoming community, generous in that way and different from other Phoenix neighborhoods, and I hope that can persist.”