Book Description

This historic resource survey documents the career and buildings of Rochester, New York's most innovative mid-twentieth century architect, James H. Johnson (1932-2016). In a career spanning nearly 60 years, Johnson designed hundreds of buildings in the greater Rochester area. He is known locally as the designer of the Antell-Whitman House (better known as the "Mushroom House"), Liberty Pole, and Temple Sinai, but his other works are not generally well known, nor is the sheer number of buildings he designed appreciated either by the general public or the architectural community.Johnson's lengthy and prolific career has left the Rochester region with a tremendous legacy of innovative, unusual buildings. Having developed an early fascination with construction, Johnson always retained his interest in participating in the fabrication of his buildings, and was often found on building sites, particularly when he supervised and took a hands-on role in the construction of his series of earth-formed buildings in the late 1960s. Inspired by nature, geometry, history, and certain architectural predecessors, notably Bruce Goff, Johnson quietly demonstrated his determination to pursue novel approaches to design and construction in both highly visible public projects and in private, personal projects for clients who wanted a house intimately tied to nature, often away from public view. From his earliest projects to some of his last, he thought expansively about integrating architecture with other art forms, and regularly collaborated with artists working in other fields, incorporating their artistic visions into his own. While his expertise with large-scale construction brought him around the world on a few occasions, he spent almost all of his long career working in the Rochester area, where his daring, expressive designs remain some of the boldest and most creative contributions to the region's architectural heritage.