John M. Johansen

Date: 25 July - 20 September 2003

Since the late 1980s, after a rich life as a practising architect, John M. Johansen (1916-2012) dedicated himself to the building of models which develop visionary ideas about architecture and urban development. He was fascinated by nanotechnology, which combines the organic properties of biology with the anorganic properties of technology. He dreams of buildings which, like biological organisms, gradually improve their own design and continually adapt themselves to the changing demands. With his interest in natural growth processes and his belief in the positive power of the latest technology, he is closely linked to kindred spirits like the designer/architect Buckminster Fuller, the technological utopians of Archigram, Yona Friedman, Cedric Price and Constant, or the art nouveau-photographer Karl Blossfeldt. In addition he is also closely related to contemporary artist-studios and architects like Acconci Studio, Atelier van Lieshout, MVRDV, Hendrik-Jan van Griensven (JIT-Life) and Robert Winkel Architects.

John M. Johansen, who has lived through and contributed to almost a full century of the history of architecture, describes his own work as 'functional expressionism'. He studied under Walter Gropius at the Harvard Graduate School of Design in Cambridge, Massachusetts and graduated in 1942 along with his classmates I.M. Pei, Philip Johnson and Paul Rudolph. Next he worked with Marcel Breuer, and together with contemporaries like Le Corbusier, Alvar Aalto, Eero Saarinen and Louis Kahn gained in-depth knowledge of the latest technological developments in the field of concrete and steel. He became world-famous with his Mummers Theater in Oklahoma (1970), which made him into the hero of the British Archigram group of architects.

Lecture
In conjunction with the exhibition ‘John M. Johansen, visionary architect, models for the 21st century & documents of kindred spirits' the architect John M. Johansen gave a lecture on his work on 9 september 2003.