Interview with Michael Johnson - January 2010

Interview by Darius Helm

In the January 2010 issue, Floor Focus caught up with Michael P. Johnson to discuss his unique perspective on architecture, the challenges of the green movement and how he uses flooring in his projects. Johnson runs his architectural firm, Michael P. Johnson Design Studio, out of Cave Creek, Arizona, and he also teaches at the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture.

Q: What drew you to the desert from Wisconsin?
MPJ: I grew up in the south. My father was professional military and I grew up in camps in the South. After the war we moved back to Wisconsin and I froze my ass off…and what really drew me to the desert was Paolo Soleri, the visionary architect, more a philosopher than an architect, and as a young architect I was interested in his work. I befriended him, brought him up to Wisconsin to give lectures, and such. I had spent some time in Arizona visiting with him and fell in love with the desert. Soleri had come to America to study with Frank Lloyd Wright.

Q: What is the role of your architecture?
MPJ: In a broader sense, the role of an architect should be looked as a constructor of dwellings, of built environments. The role of an architect should be as an educator to society…that there are benefits of living in architecture. Unfortunately, 99% of the buildings built in the U.S. have nothing to do with architecture. Mindless draftsmen for a cultureless society. The best architecture an architect does in his lifetime is the work he does in school, and then he graduates from school and goes to work in the workplace and does what I call trash for cash.

In terms of educator…when you walk into a building and realize its significance…the building has an emotional and intellectual impact on you, no matter how callous you are and no matter how uneducated you are. Even if it’s a negative feeling. For instance, many traditionalists go into my building and expect my stuff to be cold.

Q: Do people appreciate the art in architecture? Did they use to appreciate it more?
MPJ: Back when I was growing up, we were more culturally aware and more educated. When I graduated from grade school in the 50s, it was equivalent to what I see in high school graduates now. When I was in high school, part of our art education course was the study of architecture. And so we were studying the theater, reading good books, looking at architecture and the plastic arts, whereas today I don’t think any of the students have any of that kind of equipment given to them…to make a decision, a qualitative decision. So now we’ve become a much more emotional reactor to things than someone who’s qualified to look at things and make an articulate decision about it.

It’s absolutely linked to history, what I do or what any architect of significance does. I tell my students, “You can’t make history unless you know history.”

Q: I’ve read that you studied philosophy, theology and mathematics. How do they figure into architecture, generally?
MPJ: Philosophy, mathematics and theology teaches one how to think. And you can design something with a piece of paper and put some forms on it that you think are nice, but you have to be a thinker to build in an aesthetic way.

Q: How much of your work is residential versus commercial?
MPJ: Over my career of 53 years, I’ve probably done 40% commercial projects and 60% residential. The one thing about residential projects over commercial projects is that when one builds a house, they don’t need a proforma—the performance of the building economically. If you’re doing an office building or a gas station, or so on and so forth, the building has to be paid for by virtue of its function. And when you do commercial buildings, the decisions that are made about the building are curtailed by the economics of the building. Whereas a residence is a more emotional thing where all the guy has to worry about is whether he can pay for it and whether he’s willing to pay for it.

On the commercial side, you can’t be capricious about your building. So the creativity of residential design has always foreshadowed that of commercial buildings.

Buildings like churches are more in that residential vein where they don’t have to perform. In other words they don’t have to pay for themselves by virtue of their use. Museums have kind of become the new cathedrals of the architectural profession, where, though they have to pay for themselves, patrons like to put their names on it and they gift.

Right now, there is no work. And the irony is that in Arizona the only architects that are working are those involved in government buildings prior to the crash.

If a couple came to me five years ago, both solid people with decent jobs, to build a half a million dollar house, at best they’d have to have maybe $50,000 invested in the project and they could finance the rest, and today even solid people are being hampered because they need 30% to 35% down so if you take a $600,000 house, you have to have $200,000 of your own money to invest in it to get a mortgage for the additional monies.

Q: What sort of commercial jobs do you seek out?
MPJ: I have never solicited work. It usually comes to me. I’ll design any building for any kind of client—I’ve done fire stations, I’ve done banks, I’ve done schools, I’ve done a multitude of different building types. My only criteria is I have to have a client that’s going to leave me alone. I have to have a client who says I’m hiring you because I’ve seen your work, your work is pleasant to me and I know what I’m going to get. In other words, I’m not going to become a pencil for the client.

Recent commercial projects I’ve done over the last several years include an interiors project for a clothing store in a mall, a bike shop for competitive riders, a number of restaurants…but it has to be a client who is hiring me for what I do.

If someone comes to me through a recommendation, I always tell them to go on my website and look at what I do and that’s what you’re going to get. In other words if you want an organic building, you’re not going to get it from me—and I’ll give them names of good guys that will do organic buildings, for instance.

Q: What’s an organic building, compared to what you do?
MPJ: Frank Lloyd Wright was organic work personified. Mies van der Rohe was a modern architect personified—he designed the Seagram Building in New York City. Or Philip Johnson who built the Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut. Walter Gropius was another.

Historically, in terms of the definition of contemporary architecture of the 20th century, modern architecture was born in Europe with the Bauhaus….Mies van der Rohe, Gropius…that movement started in the late teens or 20s. Frank Lloyd Wright, on the organic side, started in late 19th century and spilled over into the 20th century. He died in 1959. He was a proponent of more organic architecture and more natural materials like woods and stone and plaster, whereas the modern architect was into steel and glass and more manufactured products rather than natural products.

Q: And that’s more your school of thought?
MPJ: Yeah. It was kind of interesting because when I started in the 50s I was certainly seduced by Wright’s work, and growing up in Wisconsin there was a close relationship to Wright, a knowledge of Wright, and my earlier work tended to be more organic than it ended up, but I was always trying to strip the organic building until I stripped it far enough along to fall in the camp of Mies van der Rohe rather than Frank Lloyd Wright.

Q: Is green building a big part of your work?
MPJ: To start with, if you look historically at the architecture that was done by great minds in 30s, 40s and 50s, those architects were intuitively doing green architecture. In fact, if you go to this silly fad of a few years ago, Feng Shui, a lot of it has to do with logical existence on this earth.

For instance, when they talk about building on the south side of the mountain. Why on the mountain? Why not down on the ground? Obviously for protection because you can see your enemies coming. The other thing is the south sun heats the building during the day and it carries on into the evening. All those things had to do with this kind of stuff we’re talking about with green architecture today.

I think green architecture as we know it is the biggest sham that’s ever been placed on this earth. With that I will say, for instance, LEED…now every architect around is LEED certified. The fact is if you want a platinum plaque to put on your building, you have to pay for that. First of all you’ve got to qualify it by virtue of raising the standard of the building from an energy standpoint, a consumption standpoint. Then you certify it. Even if you meet those standards, if you don’t pay LEED money, big money, you don’t get the certificate.

For instance, in the city of Scottsdale, there’s a mandate that every government building being built now has to be LEED certified. Now if I were the director or the mayor of the town, I’d say that every building should meet the LEED standard, but we’re not going to piss the taxpayer’s money away to buy a certificate from an organization that is just a capitalist company. Architects are clever, so are developers clever, so are a lot of people clever, and they’re now using this whole green thing as a marketing strategy. So I have nothing but contempt for that whole green movement.

Q: Because they’re driven by marketing, does that mean that what they’re doing is not relevant?
MPJ: No, I wouldn’t say that. I would just say that let’s be honest about it. And it’s interesting because obviously you know I do a lot of work for Ceramic Tiles of Italy and I have for almost ten years been doing seminars and symposiums on the use of ventilated wall systems, which can be proven to save up to 22% of energy consumption on high rise buildings. And I’ve given at least 20 or 30 presentations to the AIA, and I’ve given presentations at Coverings and at different conventions, and so on and so forth, and I still have not gotten one goddamn architect to do a ventilated wall system in the States. There are only two that I know of. One is the Muhammad Ali Museum and then I did a project here in Arizona.

So I like the idea that we’re thinking of green buildings but do we think as human beings about green living?

My wife will have no problem—she recycles, she’s a recycling freak—but she’ll get in her car and drive—we live out in Cave Creek, which is about 35 miles from Phoenix—she’ll drive down for lunch, come back up here, and then go back down for a meeting. That’s not green behavior. Now on the other hand I try to go into town one day a week and do five or six things, usually on a Wednesday. So if you call me up and say you want to get together on Thursday, I’d say look it, we’ve got to do it on Wednesday or wait a week until next Wednesday, because I try to live a green life rather than talk about green.

Q: What role does flooring play in your work?
MPJ: I use full body porcelain tiles for wall and floor applications. Unlike most architects, I don’t use flooring as a design element. I use it as a building element, as you would use glass as a building element, as you would use a stone wall, for instance. So the floor really becomes a building material. And I generally use white or black, and I use it as a platform for the appointments of the house—furniture, artwork, the elements that take a building and make it into a home.

If you go to most airports, they use porcelain tile because it’s durable and has all the qualities you want from a physical standpoint. But they all decorate with it. You see some ugly ass design that some stupid guy in a drafting room dreamt up…so most people use tile as a decorative thing whereas I use it specifically as a building material that becomes a platform for the reception of the artifacts that go inside the building.

Q: So when you’re putting together a project, do you have any decorative elements or do you only do building elements?
MPJ: There are no decorative elements in my buildings. I strip my architecture completely of any kind of decorative thing. But I do work with my clients in selecting artwork and furnishings, so the decorative nature of my buildings are the artwork that engage with the building, and the artwork doesn’t have to necessarily be the plastic arts. It could be certain furniture pieces.

I’m decorative in a minimal way, though. My favorite artists are Donald Judd, Dan Flavin and Josef Albers. And they’re pretty minimal. The decoration could be a piece of stainless steel by Judd hanging on the wall.

Q: How do you approach color, both in your architecture and your use of flooring? Is it always black, white, earth tones or neutrals?
MPJ: Probably 90% of the time it’s white and occasionally it’s black.

Q: I read somewhere that you said a mix of colors make a space seem smaller? Why is that?
MPJ: I don’t know why. I know that I learned it a long, long time ago. But if you have a small building, for instance, and everything’s white in that building, it’s going to look larger than if, for instance, each bedroom has a different flooring material and the living room has a different one and the kitchen has a different one. It diminishes the vastness of the space.

Even in black it would still be bigger. Unification of the color will cause the expanse of the space. And you can use less glass and have more natural light in the building with white.

Q: What are the most common types of flooring you use? Is there a difference between what you use commercially and residentially?
MPJ: It’s pretty much the same. The largest format material I can buy, the least amount of joints. So lots of 4’ by 2’ porcelain. When I first met Luciano Galassini, who works for the association over in Italy, he asked me what do I want to see his industry do, and I said I want to see a three meter by one meter tile and of course they’re making them now. And that was ten years ago.

I don’t like joints. One of the most difficult things an architect faces is the intersection of two materials which creates a joint.

Q: But you use wood as well, right?
MPJ: Yeah. And when I use wood, I usually use bamboo. It’s not deep seated in green. I like its natural color. They make it in a million different shades. And it’s got a unification of grain. It doesn’t have wild graining patterns.

In terms of hardwood, it’s so hard to get good veneers, because we’ve harvested all the old growth stuff. Back in the 50s and 60s, I just loved American walnut and I could get book matched panels with straight grains, even rosewood you could, and those are very rich woods. If I use them today, it’s in a very limited manner.

But you know what they’re doing now is the Italians are grinding up woods and remaking them into a veneer and it looks like the stuff I used to see in the 60s…so it’s real wood but a walnut may not be walnut…they’re mixing pigmentations…it’s pretty amazing stuff.

Q: You’ve spoken about enjoying the Italian approach to technology and you say you see a similar approach with the Latino influx.
MPJ: There’s no question about the Hispanic culture. See “A Day Without a Mexican.” Get it. You’ll love it. When I grew up in the 40s and 50s, I lived in a country where there were immigrants from Europe who had this great sense of craftsmanship and pride of ownership, pride of family. That all degenerated through the 60s and 70s. But I do see when I’m in Italy these wonderful manufacturing companies that are four or five generations of families and they really are prideful of what they build, construct and manufacture, and the family unit is really as strong as it is in Mexico. I have a great respect for people who are prideful of what they do and I see a lot less of it today than I did as a child.

Click here to listen to Kemp Harr's interview with Michael P. Johnson at last year's Cersaie show in Bologna, Italy.

Copyright 2010 Floor Focus 

Related Topics:Engineered Floors, LLC, The American Institute of Architects, CERSAIE , Coverings