JA Partners spoke on panels at the Library Journal’s Design Institute in Missoula, Montana. Together, library designers discussed new needs, tools, and techniques for library design in inspiring surroundings.

Their Seattle-based company, Johnston Architects, is now a rarity in the male-dominated architecture profession, recently adding two more women partners to bring its partnership team to four women and two men. Ray and Mary’s daughter, Mona Zellers, is one of the partners. Two-thirds of staffers are women.

Chinese multifamily and mixed-use developers, property owners, and investors have become more active in the U.S. over the past two decades, prompting architects to consider the unique cultural differences in the way we work and how we design apartment and condominium projects for these clients.

Architects around the world, including a few in the Seattle area, have attempted to represent the tesseract in residential construction. It’s an obscure genre that requires considerable abstraction. But the tesseract is also frequently employed less literally as a plot device in science fiction, including the young adult bestseller “A Wrinkle in Time,” a cherished book in the Bacon household.

Johnston Architects, co-founded by husband and wife Mary and Ray Johnston in 1991, recently added two new partners: Alison Walker Brems and Mona Zellers. This brings the firm's partnership team total to four women and two men.

Pacific Northwest-based Johnston Architects’ Twisp Cabin was originally designed as a vacation cabin located in the Methow Valley of Washington State. The home design has since proven remarkably adaptable.