MONDAY | OCT 30 | 4PM | AB100

Research + Practice

Join Alumnus Jeffrey Johnson, AIA, at the College of Architecture and Planning for a discussion about his academic research and professional work and how they intersect at the scale of architecture and the city.

Biography

Jeffrey Johnson, AIA is the director of the School of Architecture at the University of Kentucky College of Design and a principal of SLAB Architecture. He earned his Bachelor of Architecture and his Master of Architecture from Ball State University. In 2021, Mr. Johnson was the recipient of the CAP Outstanding Alumni Award.

As an academic, Mr. Johnson’s research focuses on the intersection of architecture and the city. His recent research has been investigating the radical transformations of China’s urban landscape through the proliferation of superblock development, the basic DNA of large-scale urban growth, which was the focus of the book he co-edited entitled The China Lab Guide to Megablock Urbanism, published by Actar and Columbia University GSAPP in 2020. Currently, he is critically examining the unprecedented museumification of China as a result of the recent museum building boom.

Prior to joining the University of Kentucky, Mr. Johnson taught for over ten years at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, at Columbia University where he was the director of Asia Megacities Lab and Studio-X Beijing. He has also taught at the Illinois Institute of Technology and at Tongji University in Shanghai.

As a practitioner, Jeffrey Johnson is a registered architect in both New York and Kentucky and a longtime member of the AIA. Mr. Johnson’s 30 years of experience include working in Chicago, New York City, Vienna, Austria, and Rotterdam, The Netherlands, and for offices that include Asymptote, Michael Sorkin Studio, and OMA/Rem Koolhaas. In 2003, in New York City, he co-founded SLAB architecture with Jill Leckner, also a Ball State alumnus. SLAB has been exhibited and published widely and has won numerous awards including three AIA NYC Design Awards and an AIA Kentucky Design Award. Mr. Johnson was part of the design team awarded an AIA Presidential Citation in 2012 for his work on the National September 11 Memorial and Museum while working with Davis Brody Bond Architects.

He was the curator and co-academic director of the 2013 Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism Architecture in Shenzhen, China.

ECAP lectures are free and open to the public. For more information email caplectures@bsu.edu.