Looks and Books
In the forthcoming exhibition, LOOKS AND BOOKS, Johnston Marklee will present a selection of the firm’s collage work. In the early phases of each project, collage offers a way of drawing freely and quickly on diverse historical precedents, selecting key elements from existing architecture to establish a lineage with which the project will engage. Through appropriations of architectural imagery, the exhibited collages produced by Johnston Marklee depict at once the firm’s work and a broader inquiry, as Martino Stierli writes, “into the relationship between architecture and its visual other, of project and projection."* Presented alongside one another, Johnston Marklee’s collages reveal the playful methodologies behind some of the firm’s most iconic residential projects, including Hill House (2001), Butterfly House (2015), View House (2015), and Vault House (2013), as well as cultural institutions like the Menil Drawing Institute (2015), MCA Chicago (2015), and Grand Traiano Art Complex (2009).
Johnston Marklee’s architectural language will also be expressed in the exhibition design itself. Drawing inspiration from Michael Asher’s 2008 sculptural installation at the Santa Monica Museum of Art – for which the artist reconstructed every temporary wall that had been built in the museum since 1998 – the collages will be installed on supporting studs which form skeletal or ghost-like wall structures within the gallery space. The firm employed a similar mode of display in recent exhibitions at Hochparterre in Zurich, Switzerland and Villa Aurora / Thomas Mann House in Berlin, Germany. In addition to their collage work, Johnston Marklee will present a selection of books and publications from the firm’s library and archive. Much like the collages, these discursive materials serve not only as resources throughout the research and planning phases of their design projects but as haptic objects; representations of the firm’s analog practice.
*Martino Stierli, “Architectures of Projection: On Some Houses by Johnston Marklee,” 2G N.67 (2014): 4-10.
About Johnston Marklee
Sharon Johnston, FAIA and Mark Lee are the founding partners of Johnston Marklee, based in Los Angeles. Since its establishment in 1998, the architecture firm has been recognized for its engagement with arts and culture within the contemporary city, while rooted in the history and foundations of the discipline.
Notable projects include the first permanent home for the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program at Roy Lichenstein Studio in New York’s Greenwich Village; the UCLA Margo Leavin Graduate Art Studios campus in Culver City, California; a renovation of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; and the Menil Drawing Institute on the campus of the Menil Collection in Houston, Texas.
Sharon Johnston and Mark Lee were the recipients of the Richard Neutra Award for Professional Excellence in 2024 and the American Academy of Arts & Letters Award in Architecture in 2022. The firm’s work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Menil Collection, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Carnegie Museum of Art, and the Architecture Museum of TU Munich.