Ralph Johnson on Designing Civic Institutions and the Beauty of Groundscapers
The Chicago-based architect, who received his MArch from the Graduate School of Design in 1973, will share insights from his career at this year’s Comeback event for alumni and friends.
The Suzhou Science and Technology Museum, in China’s Yangtze River Delta, is set at the base of Lion Mountain along Lake Taihu and the Grand Canal, and was inspired by shan sui aesthetics, unifying the mountain and lake. The building mimics a long silk ribbon that loops over itself, referencing the city’s 2,500-year history in silk production and embroidery, and includes a range of innovative elements, from an extensive rooftop garden to water features that cleanse runoff before it reaches the lake. The building inspires conversations around the relationship between the city’s growing technology and manufacturing industry and the natural world around the museum, which includes Suzhou’s nine UNESCO World Heritage Site gardens.
The museum exemplifies what its designer, Ralph Johnson (MArch ’73), has referred to as his inclination towards “groundscaper” architecture, a nod to a term developed by Shadrach Woods, a mentor of Johnson’s at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD). While many architects focus on ever-taller skyscrapers that rise into a city skyline, Johnson’s ability to connect architecture with its site and context—often in nature and the landscape—and, across an incredibly diverse body of work, may be his understated signature.
“The characteristics of the museum site—prominent geographic features like the mountain and the lake—are part of the history of the town of Suzhou,” says Johnson, “so the building references that history, and offers pedestrian connections between the surrounding park and the city.”
A featured speaker at this month’s Comeback event for alumni and friends at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD), Johnson has designed iconic buildings around the globe. His earned the Chicago American Institute of Architects (AIA) Lifetime Achievement Award in 2022, and recognitions from the National Academy of Design, into which he was inducted in 2015, and the AIA, in which he’s been a fellow since 1995. His latest book, Architecture in a Rapidly Changing World, surveys his distinguished career in two volumes.
Some of Johnson’s best-known projects, designed with the firm Perkins&Will, where he is principal and firmwide design director, include the Boeing Building, O’Hare International Terminal, and the United States Coast Guard Headquarters. The latter is part of a National Historic Landmark overlooking the mall in Washington, DC, for which Johnson was awarded the AIA’s Distinguished Building Award. Looking out over the Anacostia River, the design features a series of staggered green rooftops that blend with exterior terraces, and makes use of materials found onsite, including brick, schist stone, glass, and metal.
Similarly blending architecture and nature, the Shanghai Natural History Museum, when seen from above, whorls in the shape of a nautilus shell before opening to a pedestrian path that guides visitors to the adjacent sculpture park. The geometric patterns on the museum entrance’s “cell wall,” rising over 100 feet, mimic the building block of all living things. With a green roof, sunken garden, and pond that collects gray water and runoff, the exterior of the building speaks to the park’s surrounding trees and lawns.
Johnson’s career began when he was an undergraduate at the University of Illinois and worked at a firm that created cold storage warehouses on Chicago’s South Side.
“That was my first job,” he says. “Everything is a learning opportunity. Whether you’re working on cold storage warehouses or museums, there are always things you can learn.”
At the GSD, he was influenced by Woods, who studied with Le Corbusier and was associated with Team 10.After graduating, Johnson joined Perkins&Will in Chicago, intending to focus on schools. The firm was known for reinventing public schools in 1940, with their design of the Crow Island School, in Winnetka, Illinois—a long, low light-filled building—which became the model in the US thereafter. In collaboration with Bill Brubaker, Johnson designed the Perry Community Educational Village in Ohio, Troy High School in Michigan, and the Desert View Elementary School and Capital High School, both in New Mexico.
Cleveland, Ohio. The building, which is LEED Gold certified, connects to the rest of the campus via integrated pathways. Photo: James Steinkamp.
In working together, Brubaker and Johnson developed what they call a “kit-of-parts,” which allowed them to apply local contexts to each project. Their designs bring the community together in spaces filled with daylight, using structural and material references to the surrounding landscape. Johnson went on to design many more award-winning school and university campuses and buildings, including the Music Center at Pacific Lutheran University, which won the Progressive Architecture Award in 1984, and the AIA-award-winning Rush University Campus Transformation Project in Chicago—a butterfly-shaped design—and Tinkham Veale University Center at Case Western University in Cleveland.
One of his more recent projects, the Northtown Library and Apartments in Chicago, also recognized with several AIA awards, is a “hybrid typology of senior affordable housing and a library in same location,” explains Johnson. This, he says, was then-Chicago mayor Rahm Emmanuel’s idea, and has resulted in a center that serves both seniors and the community, benefiting both populations as they find themselves together within the library. The design “discloses its inhabitants to each other,” writes Thomas Fisher, director of the Minnesota Design Center in Architecture in a Rapidly Changing World, and “offers the apartment residents one of the greatest gifts when growing old: the ability to watch and interact with younger people, while remaining safe and secure.”
Johnson’s design for the Damen Green Line Station also unites the community, bringing to Chicago’s Near West Side an iconic train stop for the first time since 1949, reconnecting the neighborhood with the rest of the city. Using the kit-of-parts concept, Johnson explains that each component recalls a piece of Chicago’s history—bridges, towers, and steel trusses. The stop was originally constructed in 1893 (as Robey Station) for transportation to the World’s Columbian Exhibition, but since the city closed it in 1948, the neighborhood lacked easy access to downtown Chicago and other neighborhoods.
“I’m a CTA rider,” says Johnson, referring to Chicago’s public transit system. “It’s exciting to see this stop come back and to see the neighborhood grow around it.”
Today, Johnson still busy sketching, and is at work on upcoming projects including a Civil War Education Center and Museum in Vicksburg, Mississippi, in collaboration with Gallagher and Associates. A Civil War buff, this is a project of special interest for Johnson, who explains that the center will explore how, during the war, townspeople lived together in caves for months, along with Southern life before the war, slavery, and the failed venture of Reconstruction. He is also working on another educational project in Washington, DC, the Bezos Learning Center, which will allow high school students to study outer space, in connection with the National Air and Space Museum.
Since he studied at the GSD in the 1970s, Johnson has been an integral part of the community, generously supporting students with the Nagle-Johnson Family Fellowship, founded with Kathleen Nagle.
Architecture in a Rapidly Changing World celebrates his more than 50-year career. The first volume includes an essay by Ned Cramer, former editor-in-chief of Architect Magazine, and focuses on Johnson’s “Creative Journey” beginning in 1971, with images of selected projects and sketches up to 2012, while the second volume delves into “Recent Work” from 2013 to the present, and includes an essay by Fisher. As Cramer notes, while Johnson does not have a “formal signature,” his early work was influenced by James Stirling, “proponent of the megastructure,” and has shifted through various phases of modernism over time. Johnson’s lasting mark is his global designs of museums, schools, and housing that range in scale and modernist aesthetics but always connect deeply with their contexts and histories, from form to materials. Context, says Johnson, is what has been most important to him.