Philip Johnson

See Phillip Johnson for others with a similar name

IDS Center in Minneapolis

Philip Cortelyou Johnson (July 8, 1906 – January 25, 2005) was an influential American architect. The first director of the architecture department at the Museum of Modern Art (New York) in 1946, and later a trustee, he was awarded an American Institute of Architects Gold Medal in 1978 and the first Pritzker Architecture Prize in 1979. He was a student at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. In addition to his undeniable influence in the field of architecture, Johnson stands as a controversial figure for his active Fascist activities in the 30's. And intensly private man when it came to his love life and personal friendships, he is survived by his male partner of 45 years.

Influence

Through his long career Johnson was more influential for his criticism and intellectual guidance of the profession than the buildings directly credited to him. Financially independent as a result of his father's gift of Alcoa stock, he both founded and funded his directorship at MOMA. As co-author (with Henry-Russell Hitchcock Jr.) of the MOMA exhibition catalog "The International Style: Architecture Since 1922" (1932), Johnson is credited with recognizing and popularizing European modernism, and with introducing Mies van der Rohe to America. As mentor of the New York Five, power-broker, socialite, and MOMA trustee, Johnson put himself in an ideal position to promote his stance that architecture is an aesthetic pursuit equal to other fine arts. It has been said that he was weak at sketching and drawing, but regardless Philip Johnson had a very skilled graphic and design sense. The most recognizable figure in American architecture for decades, part icon, part oracle, part stand-up comic, Johnson was a reliable source of wit and provocation.

Involvement with Fascism

One controversial aspect of Johnson's career was his active promotion of fascism for eight years beginning in 1932. Johnson walked away from the success of his MOMA exhibition and, in a move described by the contemporary newspapers as 'surreal', attempted to join forces with Louisiana governor Huey Long. After Long's 1935 assassination, Johnson wrote a series of plainly anti-Semitic articles for the Detroit broadcaster Father Coughlin, ran for public office in Ohio, and tried to start an American fascist party himself. He traveled to Nuremberg for Adolf Hitler's 1938 rally, and to Poland after Germany invaded it in 1939, where he wrote:

The German green uniforms made the place look gay and happy. [...] There were not many Jews to be seen. We saw Warsaw burn and Modlin being bombed. It was a stirring spectacle.

After an FBI investigation and the pending involvement of the United States in World War II, Johnson abandoned his support of Nazis in mid-1940, and returned to Harvard. Years later he renounced fascism and designed a synagogue with no fee as a form of apology. A focus on the aesthetic to the exclusion of all other concerns became a characteristic of his philosophy; in a 1973 interview, he said:

The only thing I really regret about dictatorships isn't the dictatorship, because I recognize that in Julius's time and in Justinian's time and Caesar's time they had to have dictators. I mean I'm not interested in politics at all. I don't see any sense to it. About Hitler—if he'd only been a good architect!

Buildings

A model of the Glass House on display at MOMA in NYC

Chapel on Thanks-Giving Square in Dallas

Puerta de Europa in Madrid

The New York State Theater at Lincoln Center, seen from the Lincoln Center Plaza.

File:Williams Tower Moon.jpg

Williams Tower in Houston

Johnson's most famous work is the Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut, a transparent open-plan frame structure initially designed as his own home for his Harvard master's thesis in 1949, and in which he resided until his death. The Glass House is remarkably similar to Mies' Farnsworth House. The New Canaan estate continued to grow and now boasts a number of unique designs, including a building made out of chain-link fencing, a sculpture gallery with a glass ceiling, a house of brick mirroring his glass house, and a building with no conventionally shaped walls (having only two corners).

Johnson produced most of his work in collaboration. As the New Canaan estate demonstrates, his work is not conspicuous for its stylistic consistency or practicality. From 1967 to 1991 Johnson collaborated with John Burgee, his most productive period.

The AT&T Building in Manhattan, now the Sony Building, was completed in 1984 and was immediately controversial for its outrageous pink granite neo-Georgian pediment (Chippendale top). This was provocation on a grand scale. At the time, crowning a Manhattan skyscraper with an outsized chair-top defied every precept of the modernist aesthetic: ornament had been effectively outlawed among serious architects for years. In retrospect other critics have seen the AT&T Building as the first Postmodernist statement, necessary in the context of modernism's aesthetic cul-de-sac.

Johnson's other notable works include:

• John de Menil House, Houston (1950)
• Four Seasons Restaurant in Mies van der Rohe's Seagram Building, New York City (1959),
• New York State Theater (home of the New York City Opera and New York City Ballet) at Lincoln Center (with Richard Foster; 1964),
• the Kreeger Museum in Washington D.C. (with Richard Foster; 1967),
• Elmer Holmes Bobst Library of New York University (1967-1972)
• the IDS Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota (1972)
• South Texas Art Museum in Corpus Christi, Texas (1972)
• Boston Public Library (1973)
• Evangelist Robert Schuller's Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, California (1980)
• Williams Tower, Houston, (1983)
• AEGON Tower, Louisville, Kentucky
• the Neuberger Museum of Art at SUNY Purchase College,
• Thanks-Giving Square in Dallas, Texas,
• the main campus mall at the University of Saint Thomas in Houston, Texas
• the RepublicBank building in Houston, Texas
• the Cleveland Playhouse in Cleveland, Ohio
• the Museum of Art at Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute in Utica, New York.
• 190 South LaSalle in Chicago
• 191 Peachtree Tower, Atlanta, Georgia
• One Atlantic Center (formerly called the IBM Tower). Atlanta, Georgia
• The Urban Glass House, New York, New York
• Puerta de Europa, Madrid, Spain
• Fort Worth Water Gardens
• PPG Place in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (with John Burgee; 1984)
• Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas

Proposed

• Urban Glass House, 330 Spring Street, New York City, between Greenwich and Washington Street - 40 condominium units official website (requires Flash plug-in)

Quotes

• "Architecture is the art of how to waste space."
• "The job of the architect today is to create beautiful buildings. That's all."

Johnson wrote (Heyer, 1966):

The painters have every advantage over us today...Besides being able to tear up their failures—we never can seem to grow ivy fast enough—their materials cost them nothing. They have no committees of laymen telling them what to do. They have no deadlines, no budgets. We are all sickeningly familiar with the final cuts to our plans at the last moment. Why not take out the landscaping, the retaining walls, the colonnades? The building would be just as useful and much cheaper. True, an architect leads a hard life—for an artist.

...Comfort is not a function of beauty... purpose is not necessary to make a building beautiful...sooner or later we will fit our buildings so that they can be used...where form comes from I don't know, but it has nothing at all to do with the functional or sociological aspects of our architecture.

References

Mentioned in the song Thru These Architect's Eyes on the album 1.outside by David Bowie.

• Philip Johnson article at Great Buildings Online. Retrieved Sep. 27, 2003.
• Philip Johnson bio on the Pritzker Architecture Prize website. Retrieved Sep. 27, 2003.
• Philip Johnson on NewsHour (1996). Retrieved Sep. 27, 2003.
• Mark Stevens, "Form Follows Fascism," New York Times (Jan. 31, 2005).
• Heyer, Paul, ed. (1966). Architects on Architecture: New Directions in America, p. 279. New York: Walker and Company.
• "Philip Johnson: Dean of American Architects," Academy of Achievement (Feb. 28, 1992). (Biography, interview, audio, and photographs.)