The work of Chicago architect Ralph Johnson explores the use of restrained modernism to enrich and clarify complex programmatic buildings with intriguing assemblies that reveal their functions and hierarchical relationships. Johnson’s goal is to form, through the social art of architecture, an urban environment of buildings that are good civic neighbors as well as distinguished citizens. The projects in this book, both built and unbuilt, represent his concern for humanistic values and emphasis on process rather than preconceived product, allowing the work to respond to diverse cultures and urban conditions. Johnson is a principal and the design director at Perkins+Will. The book includes essays by Rodolphe el-Khoury, Daniel Friedman, and Thomas Fisher.

• Foreword by Thomas Fisher
• Introduction by Daniel S. Friedman
• Essay by Rodolphe el-Khoury
• Edited by Oscar Riera Ojeda

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Contributors Biographies

Ralph E. Johnson received his Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Illinois and his Master of Architecture from Harvard University. He began his career at Stanley Tigerman’s office and then joined Perkins+Will in 1976, where he currently serves as its national design director and is a member of its Board of Directors. His projects have been honored with more than seventy-five design awards, including eight national Honor Awards and numerous regional Honor Awards from the American Institute of Architects and a Progressive Architecture Design Award. He was elected to the College of Fellows of the American Institute of Architects in 1995. Johnson’s work has been exhibited extensively. He has lectured at numerous universities and was a visiting critic at the University of Illinois, the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, and the Illinois Institute of Technology. He is a member of the Board of Overseers of the Illinois Institute of Technology School of Architecture and a member of the Committee on Architecture of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Daniel S. Friedman FAIA is dean of the UW College of Built Environments (formerly the College of Architecture and Urban Planning). Prior to joining CBE, he served as director of the School of Architecture at the University of Illinois in Chicago. Friedman lectures and writes widely on professional education and ethics, public architecture, and twentieth-century theory. He holds advanced degrees in architecture from the University of Pennsylvania, where he completed his PhD on the work and writings of Louis I. Kahn.

Thomas Fisher is a professor and dean of the College of Design at the University of Minnesota. Educated at Cornell University in architecture and Case Western Reserve University in intellectual history, he previously served as the Regional Preservation Officer at the Western Reserve Historical Society in Cleveland, the historical architect of the Connecticut State Historical Commission in Hartford, and the editorial director of Progressive Architecture magazine in Stamford, Connecticut. He has lectured or juried at over 40 different schools of architecture and 60 professional societies, and has published 35 book chapters, and over 250 articles in various magazines and journals. He has published four books, and two new manuscripts will be published in 2010.

Rodolphe el-Khoury is Dean of the Miami University School of Architecture. He was Canada Research Chair at the University of Toronto, Head of Architecture at California College of the Arts, and associate professor at Harvard Graduate School of Design. El-Khoury was trained as a historian and an architect; he continues to divide his time between scholarship and practice with Khoury Levit Fong. His books on eighteenth-century European architecture include The Little House, an Architectural Seduction, and See Through Ledoux; Architecture, Theatre and the Pursuit of Transparency. Books on contemporary architecture and urbanism include Monolithic Architecture, Architecture in Fashion, and States of Architecture in the Twenty-first Century: New Directions from the Shanghai Expo.