John Moutoussamy is best known as the designer of the Johnson Publishing Company Building, the only high-rise office building in downtown Chicago with an African American client (publishing titan John H. Johnson, whose growing media empire included Ebony and Jet magazines) and architect (Moutoussamy). In his career that spanned nearly four decades, Moutoussamy also designed a wide variety of other building types, including residential towers, health care facilities, and schools.

Moutoussamy attended IIT School of Architecture on the GI Bill after serving in WWII. He studied and worked with Mies van der Rohe. He also spent time working in the office of K. Roderick O’Neil. His classmates at IIT included YC Wong, Jacques Brownson, Carter Manny and Bruno Conterato, central figures in twentieth-century modern architecture. Moutoussamy was the first black architect to become a partner in a major firm, Dubin Dubin Black & Moutoussamy.