George B. Johnston is Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in Architecture at the College of Architecture at Georgia Institute of Technology, where he has been a member of the faculty since 1984. He currently teaches courses in architectural design and in the history and theory of architectural practice.

Johnston's over-arching research interest lies in the social, historical, and cultural implications of making architecture in the American context. His ongoing research addresses inter-linked questions of how the profession of architecture simultaneously perpetuates and challenges the social constructs and conventions of the dominant culture; and the way specific instruments of practice manifest mostly unacknowledged minefields of symbolic significance. These interests inform his pedagogical approach to design and design methodology through a focus upon the order of construction- in all its sequential, tectonic, phenomenological, and classificatory senses - as a narrative framework for the architect's analogical construction of designs. Johnston is especially open to and able to support research and design projects that involve themes of memory and modernity; institutions of cultural exhibition and display; approaches to American vernacular architecture and cultural landscape; and the critique of the everyday.

Johnston received his Bachelor of Architecture degree from Mississippi State University in 1979, the Master of Architecture degree from Rice University in 1984, and the Doctor of Philosophy degree from Emory University in 2006 in the area of American Cultural History. Johnston's dissertation, focusing upon a social history of the technical handbook Architectural Graphic Standards, is to be published by the MIT Press. Johnston is a registered architect and has practiced in firms in Mississippi, Texas, and Georgia.