Five Footnotes Toward an Architecture

On the occasion of his fifth and final year as Chair of the Department of Architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, architect and educator Mark Lee (Johnston Marklee) strings together five “footnotes”—on history, on cadence, on autonomy, on America, and on point—to assess the relationship between architectural education, research, and professional practice. Evoking a similar position that marked his tenure, Lee delivers a lecture that embraces dialogue, context, and precedent, and rejects the notion of a heroic manifesto in favor of the footnote: “something ancillary, something used for referencing and providing citations for metanarratives that already exist.” And why five? “It’s a ubiquitous number in the culture of architecture. Five orders, five architects, five points.”

By Mark Lee