Published on September 20, 2018
Mary Johnston notices the big-city big picture, and the subtler, smaller, neighborhood-level pixels that shape it. But then, she’s an architect — she and her husband, Ray Johnston, founded Johnston Architects in 1991 — and plugged-in visionaries have a way of noticing things.
“Architects tend to be canaries in the coal mine,” she says. “We start to see trends in real estate before a lot of other people feel those impacts because we work with a lot of builders, developers and financers who are looking ahead. We were particularly susceptible in 2008 to people who had plans to build things and thought: ‘We don’t think we’re going to be able to do that.’ We tend to feel those trends a little bit before.”
Someone didn’t build something? Yes. That was different, too.
“So much has changed,” says Johnston, a part-time lecturer in UW’s School of Architecture. “Right now, it feels different because we have projections for continued strong growth in the area. It’s such an important question in residential architecture: How are we going to house all these people? All these people are here and not leaving anytime soon; that’s something we’re going to face for the foreseeable future — in architecture, at least.
Continue reading at the Seattle Times
Originally posted on the Seattle Times by Sandy Deneau Dunham