Brian Johnsen and Sebastian Schmaling are Visiting Professors in Practice, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and Principals, Johnsen Schmaling Architects, Milwaukee WI. For more information about this speaker’s visit, contact Associate Dean for External Affairs Gil Snyder.
Lecture Summary: In the brave new world of parametrically generated architectural profligacy, the award-winning work of Johnsen Schmaling Architects has received critical acclaim for its quiet simplicity, formal discipline, and conceptual rigor. Johnsen Schmaling’s projects are informed by a poetic reading of site and terrain that rejects literal mimesis as much as modernism’s preoccupation with self-referential objects; instead, an intense dissection of context and cultural memory translates into an abstract palette of articulate architectural operations and a deliberately sober design vocabulary – a calm, precise, and sustainable architecture whose aesthetic restraint defies the profession’s current obsession with formalistic flamboyance. Widely published in books and leading design periodicals and exhibited in galleries here and abroad, Johnsen Schmaling Architects were named an Emerging Voice by the Architectural League of New York and featured in Architectural Record’s Design Vanguard issue as one of ten “exceptional global architecture studios to watch.” This lecture will present a number of Johnsen Schmaling’s recent projects that illustrate the office’s creative process and design methodologies.
Bio: Brian Johnsen, AIA, and Sebastian Schmaling, AIA, LEED AP, founded Johnsen Schmaling Architects in 2003. Brian Johnsen, AIA, grew up in Chicago and received a Master of Architecture degree from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Sebastian Schmaling, AIA, LEED AP, is originally from Berlin and received a Master of Architecture and Urban Design from Harvard University, where he graduated with distinction; a Master of Architecture from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee; and a Dipl. Ing. Architekt degree from the Technical University Berlin.
