Philip Johnson (Telegraph)
Hyfler/Rosner
(Filed: 28/01/2005)
Philip Johnson, the architect who died on Tuesday aged 98,
created some of the most familiar buildings in the cities of
America.
As a critic, author and museum director, Johnson was an
influential figure in the East coast architectural scene in
the 1930s, long before actually becoming an architect by
profession when he was in his forties.
He was largely responsible for the introduction of the
Modern Movement to the United States, organising the first
visits of both Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier to
America; and the version of the Modern Movement that did
develop in the United States was modified by Johnson's own
humanistic and hedonistic values. Where the Modern Movement
in Europe had been inextricably linked to issues of social
responsibility (one of the major building types was
working-class housing), Johnson filtered out such issues,
which were less relevant to the American economic situation.
Towards the mid-1950s, Johnson's interest in the Modern
Movement waned, and in 1955 he said: "A style is not a set
of rules or shackles, as some of my colleagues seem to
think. A style is a climate in which to operate, a
springboard to leap further into the air."
By 1960 he was describing his position as "functional
eclecticism", and it later deviated not only from the modern
style, but from its tenets. Some buildings were far from
purely functional - in the AT&T building at Houston, with
John Burgee, he embraced the jokey references of
post-modernism.
The son of a successful attorney, Philip Cortelyou Johnson
was born at Cleveland, Ohio, on July 8 1906. His mother was
keen to introduce her son and two daughters to the world of
art, and showed them slides of paintings. She took them on a
tour of Europe, where young Philip was moved to tears by
Chartres cathedral.
His father divided his estate between his three children in
the 1920s, and Philip was a millionaire by the time he was
an undergraduate at Harvard, where he studied Philosophy and
Greek. Bouts of manic depression delayed his graduation
until 1930, and during this period he travelled to Italy,
Egypt and also Greece, where the Parthenon made a strong
impression.
A trip to Germany a year later also proved a great
influence. He visited the Bauhaus school of architecture,
and returned in 1930 with the architectural historian Henry
Russell Hitchcock. Together they met Walter Gropius, the
founder of the Bauhaus school, Le Corbusier and Mies van der
Rohe - of particular importance to Johnson's later career.
In 1930 Johnson was appointed director of the Department of
Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art, and
used this post to promote the new style of architecture he
had seen in Europe. That year he commissioned Mies van der
Rohe to build him his flat in New York.
In 1932 Johnson and Hitchcock published International Style;
Architecture since 1922, and together organised two
exhibitions of great significance to the Modern Movement in
the United States: one on modern architecture, and "Machine
Art", which was the first to present, in the spirit of the
Bauhaus, such common household and industrial items as taps,
toasters and ball bearings as noteworthy examples of design.
In the mid-1930s the Depression led Johnson to relinquish
his post at the Museum of Modern Art and involve himself in
Right-wing politics, which was later to cause him acute
embarrassment - he said of those days: "I lost my mind" -
though it did little damage to his career. In Germany, he
had been struck by the recovery that Hitler had apparently
achieved since the days of the Weimar Republic.
On returning to the United States, Johnson set up a
short-lived political party based on Hitler's National
Socialists. A year later Johnson switched his loyalties to
the Union Party, an aggregation of populists and fascists,
contributing $5,000 to the campaign of its presidential
candidate in 1936.
Three years later he became a reporter for the far-Right
American magazine Social Justice. His reports on theinvasion
of Poland included comments on the malevolent presence of
Jews on the streets; and William L Shirer, a CBS radio
correspondent who had once shared a room with Johnson,
described him as "an American Fascist" and suspected him of
spying for the Nazis.
In 1940 Johnson took up architecture once and for all,
returning to Harvard to study under Walter Gropius and
Marcel Breuer at the Department of Design. After graduating
in 1943, he served in the US Army for two years before
setting up as a designer in New York.
His first commission was a summerhouse on Long Island, and
in 1946 he returned to his post at the Museum of Modern Art,
where he remained until 1954. There he met Mrs John D
Rockefeller III, who in 1938 commissioned him to design a
guest-house for her in Manhattan.
Johnson built an impressive collection of modern art, and
donated more than 130 works to the museum, including major
pieces by Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenburg, Warhol and
Lichtenstein. In 1953 he built the Museum of Modern Art's
Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden, and 11 years
later he oversaw the expansion of the museum and its garden.
Johnson built his first important building - the Glass House
in New Canaan, Connecticut, in 1949 - for himself. Based on
a design by Mies Van der Rohe, its walls are made entirely
of glass supported by steel pillars. Johnson designed the
house with no interior divisions and filled it with
furniture by Mies and pieces from his collection.
The Glass House was built soon after the publication of
Johnson's book on Mies van der Rohe, and the influence of
the German architect was evident in such buildings as the
Oneto House at Irvington, New York (1951) and the Museum of
Modern Art Annexe (1950). It was not until the mid-1950s
that he started, albeit timidly, to abandon his influence
and develop a new style.
Like most architects of his era, Johnson was content to
accept the structural methods of the day, and happy to cite
artists and architects - Louis Kahn, Schinkel, Ledoux, Ben
Nicholson - who had influenced his designs. He once stated:
"I do not strive for originality," and he had been told by
Mies: "Philip, it is much better to be good than original."
The end of Johnson's Miesian period coincided with the
opportunity in 1956 to collaborate with Mies on the Seagram
building in New York, one of the most important urban
designs of the day and the best example of the International
Style.
Though Mies was responsible for the design of the 38-floor
building, which was set in a bronze frame and sheathed in
amber-coloured glass, Johnson worked on the interiors and
was commissioned to design the Four Seasons restaurant.
Johnson now took on more ambitious projects, though it was
not until 1962, when he was commissioned for the 17-storey
Kline Science Center at Yale, that he was called on to
create anything rivalling the Seagram building in height.
The New York State Theatre won critical acclaim for its
acoustics, sightlines and beauty, though some find the
decorative classicism of its exterior reminiscent of
Mussolini's buildings. Constructed especially for ballet
performances, the red and gold horseshoe-shaped auditorium
was designed so that no seat was more than 100 feet from the
stage.
In 1967 Johnson went into practice with John Burgee, who
provided the business acumen that Johnson lacked. Together
they formed one of the leading architects' firms in America.
Johnson, who was always good at getting clients, once
compared architects to high-class whores: "We can turn down
some projects like they can turn down some clients, but
finally we've both got to say yes to someone if we want to
stay in business."
Having gradually moved away from modernism since the 1950s,
Johnson sought inspiration in increasingly varied sources.
The 1973 extension to the McKim, Mead and White's Boston
Public Library was neo-classical in style, with three large
arches paying tribute to the older building.
Johnson and Burgee's first important project (also in 1973)
was the IDS Centre in Minneapolis: four glass buildings,
including a 51-storey tower, surrounding a
20,000-square-foot mall. There followed a Convention Centre
(1974) at Niagara Falls; a Water Garden at Fort Worth,
Texas; and Penzoil Place (1975) in Houston. Johnson's move
towards post-modernism culminated in the AT&T building in
Manhattan (1980). By this time he had denounced the
International Style as "boring, totally lacking in richness,
totally wrong".
The design for the AT&T building provoked a storm of
controversy in 1978 when it was published on the front page
of the New York Times: the building went against the
modernist tenets of a flat roof and undisguised structural
steel girders, and there were those who felt it was
incongruous on its Madison Avenue site.
It was followed by various flamboyant edifices. The "Crystal
Cathedral" was built in 1980 at Garden Grove, California,
for a television evangelist. Shaped like an elongated
four-point star, the 415-ft-long cathedral, constructed of
10,900 panes of reflective glass, is now one of the leading
tourist attractions of California.
The Republic Bank Centre (1984), a red granite tower in
Houston, referred to the Dutch Renaissance; the 64-storey
glass Transco Energy Company Building (1983), also in
Houston, is reminiscent of the Art Deco style of the 1920s;
Gothic architecture inspired the Pittsburg Plate Glass
Building (1984), a mirror-glass tower adorned with turrets.
A twice-life-size replica of the Houses of Parliament to be
made of granite and glass opposite the Tower of London as
offices for the Kuwaiti Investment Office was abandoned in
favour of a more low-key pastiche.
From 1987, Johnson acted only as a consultant for the firm,
which had changed to "John Burgee Architects with Philip
Johnson" at Johnson's request in 1983.
In 1992, aged 86, he established a new practice on his own.
He immediately attracted clients such as Donald Trump, and
received commissions for an office building at the former
Checkpoint Charlie border crossing in Berlin and an
extension to his Amon Carter Museum at Fort Worth. By this
time Johnson had abandoned post-modernism in favour of a
deconstructivist style, stating: "I like to be at the
forefront of things."
Forthright, caustic and highly articulate, Johnson's
lectures and essays arguably had more influence than his
buildings. He once described architecture as "the art of how
to waste space."
He was awarded several prizes, including the American
Institute of Architects' Gold Medal (1978) and the first
Pritzker Architecture Prize (1979). In 1984 the Museum of
Modern Art opened the Philip Johnson Gallery, the first
permanent exhibition in a major museum to be devoted to
architectural models and designs.
He is survived by David Whitney, his companion of the past
45 years.