Above: Johnston Architecture’s Eagle Point Golf Club in Porters Neck borrows elements from vernacular North Carolina train stations and lifesaving stations in its design including tapered, shingle-covered columns and bracketed roof overhangs, right. Left: the Eagle Point men’s locker room, for members only. of North Carolina’s foremost modern architects of the era, Edward Lowenstein, becoming a frequent overnight guest of the family. “He was an MIT graduate and his house was just a wonderful house with cantilevered glass walls,” Johnston says. Describing the family’s resort home in Blowing Rock, with wood frame garage doors tucked into the mountainside, “You could flip the door up, it went up on the ceiling; the walls were screened. It was fantastic,” Johnston says. At the time, Johnston was taking a course in drafting. Eventually he became an office boy for Lowenstein, running prints, clean-ing up. In high school he read philosophy, dated college girls, and “painted like a mad man,” he says, laughing. “I was doing paint-ings six feet tall. I called them tone poems. I named them after the music. I did all-white paintings, mostly with a palette knife. I had an art teacher, a professor at the college. He said, ‘What are you going to do, Henry?’ I was thinking of physics.” But the instructor suggested architecture: “They use both sides of their brain,” Johnston recalls him saying. “I think that was it.” It took Johnston six years to complete NCSU’s rigorous five-year architectural design program — carrying 20 credit hours a semester while juggling a 30-hour-per-week job as a cameraman for UNC TV, for which he also built and lit sets. “I was always doing what I wanted to do,” he says. “I was into everything, interested in everything. Just like in my practice. I had the first computer drawing system in the state. I had stayed up all night reworking stuff by hand, so frustrated with doing things in a wasteful manner, always wanted to figure out how to go from A to Z in a straight line.” “It’s like drawing a Christmas tree. You bounce around at the bottom until you get to the top. The less bouncing you can do the more quality the work will be.” Qualifying the work and trying new things were the hallmarks of Johnston’s career. Reversing the conventional beach cottage floorplan was among the innovations that led Johnston to win an American Institute of Architects North Carolina chapter award for the Flynt House on Figure Eight Island. It was the second tree house tucked into the live oak canopy on the backside of the island’s north end. “I first did a scheme for them and I can’t tell you the subtleties of why I changed my mind, but I had the scheme and I went to Greensboro with it, never been in their house before. We spent at least a half a day or more together talking about the scheme and they were happy with it; and, I remember suddenly, after I met, and looked around, and talked with them some more, I said: ‘This is wrong for you, we’re going to start over.’ They didn’t object to what I had, but I completely threw it away and redid it, and that was the one I won an award for in 1974,” Johnston says. Thirty years later, when he stepped aside to allow his son, Ian Johnston, to carry the firm’s residential design practice, he remained engaged in the remediation of water intrusion in condominiums, a sidebar for which he had become well known nationally. In 2004 Johnston Architecture would take on its grandest chal-lenge, siting and designing an 8,000-square-foot mountain house. TIM BUCHMAN PHOTOGRAPHY TIM BUCHMAN PHOTOGRAPHY 58 WBM april 2014
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