CAMBRIDGE — For MARK LEE, good things in architecture tend to come in fives: five orders, five points, five years as chair of the Department of Architecture at Harvard GSD. On Tuesday night, Lee delivered his last lecture in the role with a talk titled, “Five Footnotes Toward an Architecture.”
Over the course of almost two hours, Lee shared a series of precise and personal reflections on subjects that, in his words, “are important and relevant to architecture today.” Like Robert Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction (1966), the talk was styled as a “gentle manifesto.” Also like C&C, the discrete individual chapters (yes, five of them) that comprised the talk began with a history lesson and concluded with relevant projects by Johnston Marklee, the firm Lee co-founded with his partner, SHARON JOHNSTON, in 1998. The resemblance was not lost on members of the audience. Responding to a prompt from EMMETT ZEIFMAN, Lee explained that he does not invoke history to legitimate his work, but rather as an occasion to reflect on the parallels between his observations of the field and his professional output.
In his closing remarks, Lee invoked another architect, Walter Gropius, the founder of the Bauhaus who took up the chair at Harvard in 1938. “He once said, ‘If your contribution has been vital, there will always be somebody to pick up where you left off.’” Lee continued, “I personally feel very satisfied to be the one who helped pick up where others left off.... Why? Because I have a fundamental belief in the discipline of architecture. I believe that we are all destined to play our respective roles and collectively we make our discipline worthy of thought and discernment.”
— Phillip Denny
