When Benton Johnson was 9 years old, his father, Everette Johnson, decided they needed a new house. The family of six lived north of Bemidji.

“I looked through stacks of house plan books,” says Everette, who is an enrolled member of the White Earth Nation. (Benton is not.) “But I never found a plan that matched exactly what I wanted. So I drew my own blueprints.”

To show the family what it would be like, he decided to build a scale model.

“LEGOs were a big part of the kids’ childhood,” Everette says. “In the morning the LEGOs would come out and get spread out on the floor. The kids would play with them all day. Somebody was always building something.”

Everette decided to do the same. “I had to fight with the kids to get enough LEGOs to try and build it,” he recalls. “They kept wanting to tear it apart.”

For several years, the family worked together on the real-life version of the LEGO house. “I did all of the electrical,” Everette recalls. “And Ben helped pull the wires. He had a firsthand experience seeing how a house was constructed.”

For Benton, this is a core memory. “We were always living in a construction site,” he says. “We lived in the basement together for six or nine months. It was very much a camping experience while we were building the house.”

A few years later, their new home was finished, and Benton had a room on the third floor looking out over Big Turtle Lake. One day in middle school his class was given “career assessments.”

“I remember Ben coming home in seventh grade,” says his mother, Lisa, “and he announced he was going to be a civil engineer, because his assessment showed he could combine his love of art with his love of math. Since then, he’s never wavered.”

Johnson graduated from Bemidji High School, then enrolled at the University of Minnesota where he earned his bachelor’s, and then his master’s degree, in civil engineering. As a student he worked in the structural engineering laboratory under the late Paul Bergson.

One of his professors, Jerome Hajjar, had been an engineer at Chicago-based Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM as it’s now known), a global firm that has built everything from One World Trade Center to Milan’s Olympic Village.

“Jerry would use all these SOM examples, like the John Hancock Center and the Sears Tower. He got me really fired up about megastructures—these large buildings and complex structures. And I carried that forward.”

From Hajjar, Johnson learned about balancing loads: the “dead load,” of the building’s weight; the “live load,” of its people and furniture; and the environmental loads of seismic shocks and wind force. Meanwhile, in the lab, he researched “reinforced concrete shear walls,” which wrap around elevators and stair cores.

“By the time I was a junior,” he says, “I was like: ‘I want to do skyscrapers. I want to do tall buildings. So let’s go do the thing.’”

In 2007, Johnson landed his job at SOM. He worked on the Burj Khalifa Dubai in the United Arab Emirates: the tallest building in the world. For several months, he focused on the connection details near the top of the building, where it transitions from concrete to steel.

After that, his work shifted from a booming Dubai to a booming China, where nearly every city was a megacity that needed megastructures. The mayors of those cities also wanted iconic skylines to distinguish them. Johnson estimates he worked on some 15 projects throughout China, most of which were skyscrapers.

Yet by then, he had already started wondering about the environmental cost of such massive projects—or of any building. After all, he grew up in the North Woods. His father was a Minnesota Chippewa tribal elder. And he knew these structures left a massive footprint in terms of “embodied carbon,” which is the amount of greenhouse gas generated in producing the steel and concrete for the buildings.

Thinking back to his youth, Johnson wondered about wood. It’s lighter. It stores carbon, rather than creates it. And he believed it was vastly underrated as a construction material. So in 2013, he produced a prototype of a 400-foot-tall, 42-story building constructed entirely of “cross-laminated timber.” The novel design was estimated to reduce the embodied carbon footprint by 60 to 75 percent over conventional materials. And the design wasn’t just of a new building. Rather, it showed an entirely new way of building.

Johnson won an honorable mention for the design in Architecture Magazine’s 2014 R+D awards. One of the judges called his Tall Timber project “an engineering tour de force.” He was also named one of Engineering News-Record’s “Top 25 Newsmakers.” And in 2016 he won the Outstanding Young Engineer Award given by the Structural Engineers Association of Illinois.

In 2019, Johnson was promoted to director of the Chicago office of SOM. Around that same time, the company noticed a slowdown in its China projects. This was puzzling. But in the spring of 2020, the cause became clear: China had been quietly instituting lockdowns and restrictions to slow the spread of Covid-19.

By 2020, the slowdown was global, and many of SOM’s projects had ground to a halt. “It was a very stressful time to be the leader of an office,” Johnson says.

Fortunately, the company had already started to diversify, moving into airports, apartments, and hospitals. And so had Johnson.

“What got me into this field was high-rise buildings,” he says. “But now I’m not all skyscrapers all the time. I have a diverse set of projects, which keeps things interesting and fun.”

Those projects range from the Appleton Public Library to a cultural center in Green Bay; from an all-timber County Office Building in California to a new concourse at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport.

“The great thing about SOM is that it’s not all about tall buildings,” he says. “It’s about solving interesting and difficult problems. It’s about asking, ‘How is this going to impact people as they walk through?’ It’s about making sure a building has qualities that will be uplifting to the people that use and view them.”

Recently, Johnson got a patent approved for a specialized timber connector, which allows long-span floor systems. This solved a problem he had been working on since his 2013 Tall Timber project. The new joints will help make timber buildings more flexible and long-lived and reduce the amount of material used by an estimated 30 percent.

But there’s one other project especially close to his heart.

In 2020, Johnson and his wife bought 13 acres of land in Wisconsin halfway between Chicago and Minneapolis. They cleared the land and started building a cabin in the woods. Because of the pandemic, contractors were in short supply. They ended up doing much of the work themselves.

The cabin is built into a hill. As of this writing, they were working on the interiors, and living in the basement, which is also the garage. The house is set up so that more floors can be built on top.

When it’s finished, Johnson will once again be able to stand in a space he built and look out over the treetops, into the world.

If you liked this story, Minnesota Alumni magazine publishes four times a year highlighting U of M alumni and University activities. Early access to stories and a print subscription are benefits of being an Alumni Association member. Join here to receive a printed copy at home.