“It looks like a lotus,” Johnson says, “but they’re calling it the Iconic Tower.”Īmong the many icons by Johnson that pepper Chicago are O’Hare’s striking international terminal the cloverleaf-shaped Rush Hospital tower that breaks up the monotony of a drive into the city on the Eisenhower Expressway a colorful combination of library and affordable senior housing in West Ridge the dramatic Skybridge condo building that towers over the Kennedy Expressway in the West Loop and William Jones College Preparatory High School, a seven-story campus in the South Loop. The round, slender tower due to be completed in 2023 appears to open slightly at the top, like a slim flower stalk about to bloom. That’s about all the self-indulgence he allows in an interview before switching the topic to his Egypt tower, a model of which stands in the reception area of the Wrigley Building offices of Perkins & Will, the architecture firm where he has worked since the mid-1970s. The twin lifetime achievement awards, Johnson says, “are high honors, and they also mean that I’m still working.” Johnson has done “a long list of projects all around Chicago that, without having an exclamation point that says ‘these are Ralph Johnson buildings,’ are really exposing people in Chicago to the best of the built environment every day,” says Drew Deering, an associate principal at Chicago architecture firm Moody Nolan and president of AIA Chicago. In recognition, this year he’s receiving lifetime achievement awards from the University of Illinois architecture school and the American Institute of Architects Chicago chapter. 1, has a vast portfolio of bold works here and around the world.

As he nears the 50-year mark of practicing architecture in Chicago, Johnson, who will turn 74 on Oct. Johnson’s buildings, by contrast, speak volumes. At its Southbank development on the Chicago River just south of the Loop, Australia-based Lendlease finished one building designed by Johnson, the 29-story Cooper apartments, in 2018 and expects to complete another, the 41-story Reed condominiums, in 2023. He doesn’t have that giant ego,” says Linda Kozloski, an architect and creative design director for Chicago development at Lendlease. That’s in part because Johnson, whom virtually everyone who is asked describes as “soft-spoken” or “mild-mannered,” would be the last person to trumpet his own eminence. And yet, if you sat near him on a CTA train-and it’s possible you have-you’d have no idea he’s a prominent figure in the world’s architecture scene. Johnson designed a single-family home in India 27 stories tall, a museum in Shanghai that resembles a nautilus shell and an 80-story skyscraper planned as a showpiece of Egypt’s new administrative capital outside Cairo. We’re surrounded by his distinctive works, including the Boeing Building, the international terminal at O’Hare Airport, the clover-shaped high-rise at Rush University Medical Center and several sharp, contemporary downtown residential buildings.

Showoff canopies