Founded in Los Angeles in 1998 by Sharon Johnston (Santa Monica, California, 1965) and Mark Lee (Hong Kong, 1967), the firm Johnston Marklee also has an office in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The founders met as students at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where they now teach. In the past two decades, they have distinguished themselves in numerous international awards for their attention to the precision of their architectural design, applied to different scales of building. In parallel, they cultivate attentive research activities as a base for their professional practice.

They are known to the public for having been the artistic directors of the 2017 Chicago Architecture Biennial, which they themed “Make New History”. The event became a manifesto and an expression of a form of architecture opposed to form. Johnston Marklee started out with experiments in single-family housing, the kind most diffuse in Los Angeles. Such focus honed the firm’s domestic, intimate sensibility that later exploded on a larger scale.

The office’s bent for a measured yet exceptionally clear approach is seen in the design for the Menil Drawing Institute on the campus of the Menil Collection in Houston (2018). The building connects directly to the park and other pieces of architecture by behaving like a graft in a complex system. Externally, it emanates the equilibrium of its composition instead of imposing monumental volume.

The same design care and respect were given to the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2017). The renewal is an homage to the existing building, yet at the same time it brings a number of radical changes that project the institute toward being a contemporary cultural space. While working inside the existing grid, the design focuses on the spaces of relations and sociality, once again expressing marked sensibility in giving a public space a domestic, intimate shape, redefining by means of simplicity the use of the space.