Sharon Johnston

Sharon Johnston and Mark Lee won a Holcim Foundation Awards 2017 Acknowledgement for “Elemental Construction: UCLA Warner Graduate Art Studio renovation and addition, Culver City, CA, USA” – an addition to and adaptive reuse of a former wallpaper factory using elemental construction for the Graduate Art Studios at UCLA in Culver City, California. The project’s basic objectives are twofold: to rehabilitate existing urban and architectural elements – through adaptive reuse and complementary additions; and to frame a discourse on the role of mundane construction as the generator of space and form.

Sharon Johnston has taught at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design (GSD), Princeton University, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and has held the Cullinan Chair at Rice University and the Frank Gehry International Chair at the University of Toronto. She was the Artistic Director of the 2017 Chicago Architecture Biennial together with partner Mark Lee.

Johnston Marklee incorporate typical forms but then challenge them, question regular patterns of occupation, and push zoning envelopes since 1998. The studio has been recognized nationally and internationally with over 30 awards, with projects at diverse scales and types spanning North and South America, Europe, and Asia. Projects include the Menil Drawing Institute; renovation of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; and UCLA Graduate Art Studios campus in Culver City, California. The work of the firm is featured in A House is a House is a House is a House (Basel Birkhauser, 2016).

The studio’s work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Art Institute of Chicago, Menil Collection, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Carnegie Museum of Art, and Architecture Museum of TU Munich.