Mark Lee in Conversation with Fredi Fischli & Niels Olsen

In the forthcoming installment of Schaufensterprojekt at Hochparterre Bücher, Johnston Marklee will exhibit a selection of the firm’s collage work. In the early phases of each project, collage offers a way of drawing freely and quickly on diverse historical precedents, selecting key elements from existing architecture to establish a lineage with which the project will engage. Through appropriations of architectural imagery, the exhibited collages produced by Johnston Marklee depict at once the firm’s work and a broader inquiry, as Martino Stierli writes, ‘into the relationship between architecture and its visual other, of project and projection.’

On June 2nd, Mark Lee will be joined by Fredi Fischli & Niels Olsen to discuss his recent book, Five Footnotes Toward an Architecture, co-published by Sternberg Press & Harvard Design Press, in which he present body of work on the basis of five “footnotes” – on history, on cadence, on autonomy, on America, and on point – transcribed from Lee’s Walter Gropius lecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design (GSD), on the occasion of his fifth and final year as Chair of the Department of Architecture.

Mark Lee is the founding partner of Johnston Marklee, based in Los Angeles, California. Mark has previously taught at UCLA, Princeton University, TU Berlin, ETH Zurich, and the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where he is Chair Emeritus of the Department of Architecture. Mark served as the Artistic Co-Director of the 2017 Chicago Architecture Biennial, and he has been awarded by the American Academy of Arts & Letters, the Society of Architectural Historians, The University of Southern California School of Architecture as Distinguished Alumnus, and Cal Poly Pomona with the Richard Neutra Medal.