The 2019 Herbert Baumer Memorial Seminars will focus on the work of Sharon Johnston and Mark Lee, co-founders of the Los Angeles-based Johnston Marklee & Associates.

Projects undertaken by Johnston Marklee & Associates since its founding in 1988 are diverse in scale and type, spanning seven countries throughout North and South America, Europe and Asia. Recent projects include the Menil Drawing Institute on the campus of the Menil Collection, which opened in November 2018; a renovation of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, completed in September 2017; the new UCLA Graduate Art Studios campus in Culver City, California; and the design of the new Dropbox global headquarters in San Francisco, California. The firm was listed in the 2019 AD100 list of top architects and designers by Architectural Digest, and was named the 2016 Oliver Fellows for Architecture & Design.

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. HOUSE IS A HOUSE IS A HOUSE IS A HOUSE IS A HOUSE, a book on the work of the firm, was published by Birkhauser in 2016.

Sharon Johnston FAIA is Professor in Practice at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. She has taught at Princeton University and the University of California, Los Angeles, and has held the Cullinan Chair at Rice University and the Frank Gehry International Chair at the University of Toronto.

Mark Lee has served as Chair of the Architecture Department at the Harvard Graduate School of Design since 2018. Lee has taught at the University of California, Los Angeles, the Technical University of Berlin and ETH Zurich. He has held the Cullinan Chair at Rice University and the Frank Gehry International Chair at the University of Toronto.

Johnston and Lee served as Artistic Directors of the 2017 Chicago Architecture Biennial. As part of the Baumer Lecture Series, the pair will co-lecture in Knowlton Hall’s Gui Auditorium at 5:30 p.m. on Wednesday, November 6.