The architects Sharon Johnston and Mark Lee are seated at the long conference table in their Los Angeles office. Stacks of art and architecture books are piled in front of them, forming a landscape of references and influences. Lee picks up a sizable monograph, opens it to an image, and places the book on top of the pile. Thomas Ruff’s Sammlung Goetz (1994) fills a double-page spread. The photograph is a deadpan portrait of a contemporary art gallery in Munich designed by the Swiss architecture firm Herzog + de Meuron.
“We met each other when we were students at the Harvard Graduate School of Design [GSD]—in a design studio taught by Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron,” says Lee, who is currently chair of the Department of Architecture at GSD. He and Johnston founded their eponymous firm, Johnston Marklee, in 1998. In the years
