The Urn and the Chamber Pot with Mark Lee

On Monday, November 18, 2024 the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, College of Architecture and Design welcomed Mark Lee as a guest lecturer in the Robert B. Church III Memorial Lecture Series.
Mark Lee is a founding partner of Johnston Marklee, based in Los Angeles. Since its establishment in 1998, Johnston Marklee has been recognized nationally and internationally with over 50 major awards. In 2022, Johnston Marklee was recognized by the American Academy of Arts & Letters with the Arts and Letters Award in Architecture, and in 2023, the Johnston Marklee-designed Menil Drawing Institute was named a finalist by the Mies Hall Crown Americas Prize. A book on the work of the firm, entitled, HOUSE IS A HOUSE IS A HOUSE IS A HOUSE IS A HOUSE, was published by Birkhauser in 2016. Monographs include: 2G N. 67, El Croquis N. 198, and A+U N. 614.
Mark is Professor in Practice at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where he served as the Chair of the Department of Architecture from 2018 to 2023. He has also taught at Princeton University, the University of California, Los Angeles, the Technical University of Berlin, and ETH Zurich. He has held the Cullinan Chair at Rice University and the Frank Gehry International Chair at the University of Toronto.
Projects undertaken by Johnston Marklee are diverse in scale and type, spanning fourteen countries throughout North and South America, Europe, and Asia. Recent projects include the permanent home for the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program (ISP) at Roy Lichtenstein Studio in New York’s Greenwich Village; the Menil Drawing Institute in Houston, Texas; the UCLA Graduate Art Studios campus in Culver City, California; and a renovation of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Current projects include the residential towers, Ray Nashville, in Tennessee, and Ray Phoenix, in Arizona; a renovation of the UCLA Reverend James Lawson Jr. Worker Justice Center in Los Angeles; and the interior architecture and museology within the Kunstmuseum Hauptbau in Basel Switzerland, in collaboration with Christ & Gantenbein.
The firm’s work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Menil Collection, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Carnegie Museum of Art, and the Architecture Museum of TU Munich. Together with partner, Sharon Johnston FAIA, Mark was the Artistic Director of the 2017 Chicago Architecture Biennial.