Nathan Johnson
*The birth of Nathan Johnson is celebrated on this date in 1926. He was a Black architect.
Born in Herington, Kansas, he came to Detroit to work as a draftsman for White and Griffin before forming his firm in 1956. He pursued an adventurous modern style in church architecture with some of Detroit's most historic black faith communities. By 1963, an article in the Detroit Free Press reported that he "has built or is planning a dozen churches."
In the same article, Johnson articulates the modernist underpinning of his work: "We try to be honest. If we want to decorate a church, we let the structure do it instead of applying ornaments."
Notable examples of his early work include the 1963 transformation of the new home of the New Bethel Baptist Church and the Brutalist 1968 addition to the Second Baptist Church in Greektown, which manages to be strikingly modern and well-integrated into that dense, historic urban neighborhood. In the 1980s, under Mayor Coleman Young, Johnson was given the opportunity to design all of downtown's People Mover stations, which he shared by subcontracting several stations to his African American peers, including Aubrey Agee, Roger Margerum, Sims, and Varner.
In 1989, Nathan Johnson & Associates sued Smith, Hinchman & Grylls unsuccessfully over his reduced role in the Veterans Administration Hospital project. Nathan Johnson & Associates had anywhere from two to 40 employees during its long practice, which wound down around 2000. He achieved success locally as a modernist architect, contributing significantly to Modern architecture in the Detroit area. Nathan Johnson passed away in November 2021 at age 96.
