After Tuesday’s announcement that the 47-year-old Chicago architect Jeanne Gang had won a MacArthur Fellowship “genius” grant, her competitor Ralph Johnson reflected back to 15 years ago, when he was one of the city’s rising design stars.
“It’s hard to be hot forever,” mused Johnson, now 62, a partner at the Chicago office of Perkins+Will. “I feel like I’m still creative, challenging myself, and working in a lot of interesting places.”
They range from Chicago’s West Side, where a new Johnson-designed hospital for Rush University Medical Center will be dedicated Dec. 8, to Mumbai, where he designed a 27-story home for India’s richest person and his family. Critics have labeled the tower, which includes parking for 300 cars, corporate entertainment facilities, a movie theater and the family’s ultra-spacious living quarters, a blatant symbol of excess.
Johnson is rarely associated with anything so over-the-top, either in his buildings or in his manner.
A native of Chicago’s Southwest Side, he has quietly turned out a string of award-winning modernist buildings that simultaneously acknowledge and uplift their surroundings. They range from the 36-story Boeing World Headquarters (originally the Morton International Building) on the west side of downtown to O’Hare International Airport’s international terminal.
The Rush hospital, which places a curving tower for patients’ rooms atop a rectangular base housing diagnostic and treatment facilities, could be one of Johnson’s best buildings yet.
While its boldly sculptural form is clearly meant to grab the eyes of drivers on the nearby Eisenhower Expressway, the architect insists that the building’s contours grew from the inside out, following a careful analysis of its functions. Rush executives “told us — don’t give us a shape and shove the rooms in it,” he said.
Johnson’s other current Chicago projects include a proposed visitor center and parking garage on the south end of Northwestern University’s Evanston campus and the under-construction Jones College Prep High School in the 600 block of South State Street.
As for his towering high-rise in Mumbai, Johnson shrugs off its critics.
“I was interested in it not because it’s the biggest house in the world,” he said. Instead, Johnson continued, the project attracted him because it’s a “vertical green tower” where he could experiment with things like a hydroponic wall, where plants grow without soil.
“We used it as kind of a research project,” the architect said.
