AN checks in with Johnston Marklee
The UCLA Margo Leavin Graduate Art Studios, designed by Los Angeles-based architecture firm Johnston Marklee and Associates, is a world-class facility dedicated to supporting emerging artists and strengthening Los Angeles’s position as a world arts capital. In July 2016, the School of the Arts and Architecture received a generous $20 million lead gift from alumna and renowned art dealer Margo Leavin in support of the project. And now, the major restoration and expansion creates a new building for the nation’s top-ranked public university to support its leading graduate program.
"Architecture studio Johnston Marklee is best known for designing sophisticated, site-sensitive buildings befitting the display and production of visual art. The Los Angeles–based firm has designed multiple galleries and exhibition pavilions, and its most internationally renowned work is the 2019 AN Best of Design Award-winning Menil Drawing Institute.
Outside of the Margo Leavin Graduate Art Studios. (Iwan Baan) Yet principal Sharon Johnston, who founded the firm alongside partner in business and life Mark Lee in 1998, is quick to point out that the eponymous firm has “produced a diverse body of works” that defies any strict scale or type. “Our interest is in history and working within the landscape,” said Johnston.
“A key part of our practice is pushing out of bounds to look back at questions we as architects ask with a fresh lens,” Johnston continued. “A diversity of voice is something we cultivate with a lot of intentions.”
That diversity is most apparent in the number of private homes that Johnston Marklee has designed in Southern California and locales farther afield, including Argentina, Hawaii, and Marfa, Texas. Each of the firm’s residential projects responds to the surrounding landscape, be it the high desert or abutting the Pacific Ocean, in subtle yet innovative ways. The homes also possess, to quote Johnston, an embedded “sense of intimacy and generosity” that can be found throughout the firm’s output, which also includes retail environments for clients such as Knoll, Aesop, and Chan Luu.
“A sense of the domestic is core to all of our work,” said Johnston, who noted that the firm’s approach has benefited from working with a specific group of clients who are “looking for new frames of reference…and we like fitting into this space.
Margo Leavin Graduate Art Studios
Completed in 2019 for the School of Arts and Architecture at the University of California, Los Angeles, the Margo Leavin Graduate Art Studios breathe new life into an old wallpaper factory in Culver City, California, without stripping the space of its historical patina. Located in a once down-and-out industrial zone known as the Hayden Tract, the project combines an adaptive reuse agenda with a 26,800-square-foot expansion in line, said Johnston, with the architects’ dual objective to find “contemporary expressions within a historic warehouse building” while “thinking about every square inch as a production space.” This approach lends the bustling complex, which includes studios, galleries, classrooms, laboratories, and an artist-in-residence loft, more of a 'factory than a school sensibility.'"— Matt Hickman, May 11, 2020
This post is an excerpt. Read the full article on the Architect's Newspaper website.
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