Mary Vaughan Johnson, 1961-2021

A head of architecture at Kingston University who championed diversity and inclusion has died.

Mary Vaughan Johnson was born in Zimbabwe to American parents in 1961 and went to school there, as well as in Zambia and Atlanta, Georgia. She gained both a bachelor’s (1985) and a master’s degree in architecture (1990) at the Georgia Institute of Technology and went on to practise as an architect in Georgia, Pennsylvania and Florida.

In 2006, Ms Johnson moved to Paris to take on the role of chief docent and curator at the Maison de Verre, an early modernist masterpiece designed by Pierre Chareau and Bernard Bijvoet that she had first visited as a student in 1983. She combined this with research for a PhD at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University – on the subject of the Maison’s toilets.

This arose, she once explained, out of an “interest in the concept of private and public spheres in architecture” which Ms Johnson attributed to the fact that she had grown up in “a culture [in Zimbabwe] where the public takes precedence over the individual and the private, an experience which was flipped when I moved to the US, a culture where the individual takes precedence over the collective”.

While in Paris, Ms Johnson was also resident programme director for the Catholic University of America’s School of Architecture Studies Abroad, and taught at the École Spéciale d’Architecture and Columbia University’s study abroad programme. She moved to the UK to take up a position at De Montfort University in Leicester before joining Kingston University as an associate professor – and head of the department of architecture and landscape – in 2018.

Deeply committed to diversity and inclusion, Ms Johnson always sought to open her students’ eyes to architecture well beyond the Western canon and took one group on a trip to Ghana. She also convened regular drop-in “open conversations” where students and staff got a chance to talk freely about equality and institutional change.

“Mary saw the value of her students’ lived experiences to their development as designers and architects,” said Nana Biamah-Ofosu, a lecturer in architecture at Kingston, and “empowered them to draw on these experiences and to take risks. She would say, ‘Dream wildly, attempt the absurd and, even if you achieve half what you set out to do, it will be brilliant.’ That was how she approached student and staff projects – nothing was out of bounds and everyone’s ideas were valid.”

Ms Johnson died on 7 March after suffering a pulmonary embolism and is survived by her two children.

matthew.reisz@timeshighereducation.com