Five Footnotes Toward an Architecture

Architect Mark Lee presents a body of work on the basis of five considerations: on history, on cadence, on autonomy, on America, and on point.

On the occasion of his fifth and final year as Chair of the Department of Architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, architect and educator Mark Lee strings together five “footnotes”—on history, on cadence, on autonomy, on America, and on point—to assess the relationship between architectural education, research, and professional practice. Evoking a similar position that marked his tenure, Lee delivers a lecture that embraces dialogue, context, and precedent, and rejects the notion of a heroic manifesto in favor of the footnote: “something ancillary, something used for referencing and providing citations for metanarratives that already exist.” And why five? “It’s a ubiquitous number in the culture of architecture. Five orders, five architects, five points.”

Copublished by Harvard Design Press

Mark Lee is principal and founding partner of the Los Angeles–based architecture firm Johnston Marklee. Since its establishment in 1998, Johnston Marklee has been recognized nationally and internationally with over thirty major awards. A book on the work of the firm, entitled HOUSE IS A HOUSE IS A HOUSE IS A HOUSE IS A HOUSE, was published in 2016. This followed a monograph on the firm’s work, published by 2G in 2014. Mark is Professor in Practice at the Harvard GSD and has 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.