Philip Johnson; NY Times obituary
Hyfler/Rosner
Philip Johnson Is Dead at 98; Architecture's Restless
Intellect
By PAUL GOLDBERGER NY Times
Philip Johnson, at once the elder statesman and the enfant
terrible of American architecture, died yesterday at the
compound surrounding the Glass House, the celebrated
residence he built for himself in New Canaan, Conn. He was
98.
His death was disclosed by David Whitney, his companion of
45 years.
Often considered the dean of American architects, Mr.
Johnson was known less for his individual buildings than for
the sheer force of his presence on the architectural scene,
which he served as a combination godfather, gadfly, scholar,
patron, critic, curator and cheerleader. His 90th birthday,
in July 1996, was marked by symposiums, lectures, an
outpouring of essays in his honor and back-to-back dinners
at two venerable New York institutions he had played a major
role in creating: the Museum of Modern Art, whose department
of architecture and design he joined in 1930, and the Four
Seasons restaurant, which he designed as part of the Seagram
Building in 1958.
His long career was a study in contradictions. He first
became famous as an impassioned advocate of Modern
architecture, and his early writings helped establish the
reputation of European Modernists like Mies van der Rohe and
Walter Gropius in this country. He began his architectural
career as Mies's leading acolyte. But what fascinated him
most was the idea of the new, and once he had helped
establish Modernist architecture in the United States, he
moved on, experimenting with decorative Classicism,
embracing the reuse of historical elements that would become
known as postmodernism, and finally returning again to
Modernism, yet one with an expressive and highly emotional
energy.
Mr. Johnson's own architecture received mixed reviews and
often startled the public and his fellow architects. Because
of his frequent changes of style, he was often accused of
pandering to fashion and of designing buildings that were
facile and shallow. Yet he created several designs,
including the Glass House, the sculpture garden of the
Museum of Modern Art, and the pre-Columbian gallery at
Dumbarton Oaks in Washington that are widely considered
among the architectural masterworks of the 20th century. And
for his entire career, his engagement with architectural
theory and ideas was as deep as that of any scholar.
He was the first winner of the Pritzker Prize, the $100,000
award established in 1979 by the Pritzker family of Chicago
to honor an architect of international stature. In 1978, he
won the Gold Medal of the American Institute of Architects,
the highest award the American profession bestows on any of
its members.
As an architect, he made his mark arguing the importance of
the aesthetic side of architecture and claimed that he had
no interest in buildings except as works of art. Yet he was
so eager to build that he willingly took commissions from
real estate developers who refused to meet his aesthetic
standards. He liked to refer to himself, with only some
irony, as a whore. And in the 1930's, this man who believed
that art ranked above all else took a bizarre and, he later
conceded, deeply mistaken detour into right-wing politics,
suspending his career to work on behalf of Gov. Huey P. Long
of Louisiana and later the radio priest Father Charles
Coughlin, and expressing more than passing admiration for
Hitler.
Mr. Johnson's foray into fascism was over by the time the
United States entered World War II, and in the mid-1950's he
sought to publicly atone to Jews by designing a synagogue in
Port Chester, N.Y., for no fee. But to the end of his life
the contradictions continued. With his dignified bearing and
elegant, tailored suits, he looked every bit the part of a
distinguished, genteel aristocrat, but he played the
celebrity culture of the 1980's and 90's as successfully as
a rock star. To the public, he was far and away the
best-known living architect, and his crisply outlined, round
face, marked by heavy, round black spectacles of his own
design, was a common sight on television programs and
magazine covers.
Except for his brief involvement in right-wing politics, all
of his careers revolved around architecture. He began his
professional life as a writer, historian and curator and did
not enter architecture school until he was 35. Even when he
became one of the nation's most eminent practicing
architects, he continued to be a major patron of
institutions and of younger architects, whose work he
followed with avid interest.
He began his career as an ardent champion of Modernism, but
unlike many of the movement's early proselytizers, he
changed with the times, and his own work showed a major
movement away from beginnings that were heavily influenced
by Mies. In the late 1950's, just after he had collaborated
with Mies on the Seagram Building on Park Avenue, he
introduced elements of classical architecture into his
buildings, beginning a long quest to find ways of connecting
contemporary architecture to historical form. It was a quest
that would begin with highly abstracted versions of
Classicism in the 1960's and culminate in a much more
literal use of the architectural forms of the past in his
revivalist skyscrapers of the 1980's.
That phase of Mr. Johnson's career included such well-known
monuments as the classically detailed pink-granite AT&T
Building (now the Sony building) on Madison Avenue, which he
completed in 1984 with John Burgee, then his partner; the
Republic Bank tower (now NCNB Center) in Houston, which used
elements of Flemish Renaissance architecture; the Transco
Tower (now the Williams Tower) in Houston, which
recapitulated the setback forms of a romantic 1920's tower
in glass, perhaps his finest skyscraper; and the PPG Place
in Pittsburgh, a reflective glass tower whose Gothic form
copied the shape of the tower of the Houses of Parliament in
London.
Focusing on Historical Form
Institutional clients also received their share of Mr.
Johnson's fixation with historical form: he designed a
Romanesque structure in brick for the Cleveland Play House
and a Classical building based on the designs of the French
visionary architect Étienne-Louis Boullée for the
architecture school of the University of Houston.
In the late 1980's Mr. Johnson's restless mind, having
played a major role in shifting American architecture toward
postmodernism, with its reuse of traditional elements, moved
on yet again. Fascinated by the intense, highly abstract
work of a group of younger Modernist architects who were to
become known as the deconstructivists, Mr. Johnson began to
incorporate elements of their architecture into his own
work.
He was particularly entranced with the buildings of the Los
Angeles architect Frank Gehry, whose complex, seemingly
irrational forms would appear to be the antithesis of the
cool, rational, ordered architectural world of Mr. Johnson's
first mentor, Mies, and much of his late work reflected Mr.
Gehry's influence.
Mr. Johnson, an urbane, elegant figure, was perhaps the most
socially prominent New York architect since Stanford White.
Born to wealth, he and Mr. Whitney, a curator and art
dealer, lived well, for many years in a town house on East
52nd Street that Mr. Johnson had originally designed as a
guest house for John D. Rockefeller 3d, then in an
elaborately decorated apartment in Museum Tower above the
Museum of Modern Art and always on weekends in the famous
Glass House compound.
Mr. Johnson had lunch daily amid other prominent and
powerful New Yorkers at a special table in the corner of the
Grill Room of the Four Seasons. His guest was likely to be a
young architect in whose work he had taken an interest, and
for years his table functioned as a kind of miniature
architectural salon.
In the evenings, he was frequently seen at exclusive social
events, for years by himself and in the last decade, as he
felt greater ease in making his relationship with Mr.
Whitney public, with his companion. He was among the few
architects whose comings and goings were considered worthy
of notice in the gossip columns.
He had been an active art collector since the days when, as
a student traveling in Germany, he bought a pair of Paul
Klees from the artist. Eventually he came to be a collector
of contemporary art: advised by Mr. Whitney, he filled his
walls with paintings by Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol and
Jasper Johns when they were just gaining public attention,
and he amassed one of the most complete collections of
paintings by Frank Stella in private hands.
Mr. Johnson not only lived and ate in places of his own
design, he also worked in them. For many years his office
was in the Seagram Building. Mr. Johnson practiced alone
there for some years, then collaborated with the architect
Richard Foster, for a time, and in 1967 formed a partnership
with John Burgee.
It was this partnership that transformed Mr. Johnson from a
scholar-architect designing small to medium-size
institutional buildings for well-to-do clients into a major
force in commercial architecture. Mr. Burgee's arrival
coincided with the firm's movement toward a number of major,
widely acclaimed skyscraper projects, including the IDS
Center in Minneapolis and Pennzoil Place in Houston. Mr.
Johnson's leanings were always toward the aesthetic issues
in design, and in Mr. Burgee he had a partner who could
serve not only as a colleague in design but also as an
executive overseeing the kind of large architectural office
required to produce major skyscrapers.
As if to mark Mr. Burgee's role, the Johnson-Burgee firm
moved in 1986 into the elliptical skyscraper at 885 Third
Avenue, between 53rd and 54th Streets. Popularly known as
the Lipstick Building, it had been designed by the partners
together. But the partnership was not to last long beyond
the move: Mr. Burgee, eager to occupy center stage,
negotiated a more limited role for Mr. Johnson and in 1991
exercised the prerogative he had as the firm's chief
executive and eased Mr. Johnson out altogether.
It proved an unwise decision: the firm, crippled by an
arbitration decision unrelated to Mr. Johnson, soon went
into bankruptcy, all but ending Mr. Burgee's career. Mr.
Johnson, who had severed ties to his former firm, had no
liability and went on to rent a smaller space in the
Lipstick Building, gleefully hanging out his shingle in his
mid-80's and declaring himself in business as a solo
practitioner. Before long, he had several commissions,
including a cathedral in Dallas, and his career had
recharged itself.
Philip Cortelyou Johnson was born on July 8, 1906, in
Cleveland, the son of Homer H. Johnson, a well-to-do lawyer,
and Louise Pope Johnson. Supported by a fortune that
consisted largely of the Aluminum Company of America stock
given him by his father, Mr. Johnson went to Harvard to
study Greek, but became excited by architecture and spent
the years immediately after his graduation in 1927 touring
Europe and looking at the early buildings of the developing
Modern architecture movement.
He teamed up with Henry-Russell Hitchcock, at that time the
movement's chief academic partisan in the United States, and
their travels together resulted in their book "The
International Style," published in 1932 and now a classic.
"We have an architecture still," is how Mr. Johnson and Mr.
Hitchcock concluded the book, which played a major role in
introducing Americans to the work of European Modernists
like Mies, Gropius and Le Corbusier, then barely known here.
In 1930, Mr. Johnson joined the architecture department at a
new institution in New York, the Museum of Modern Art. He
moved the museum quickly to the forefront of the
architectural avant-garde, sponsoring exhibitions on
contemporary themes and arranging for visits by Gropius, Le
Corbusier and Mies, for whom he also negotiated his first
American commission.
Mr. Johnson left the museum in 1936 to pursue his political
agenda, dividing his time among Berlin, Louisiana and his
family's home in Ohio. By the summer of 1940, his
infatuation with right-wing politics had faded, although as
Franz Schulze, his biographer, wrote in 1994, it was never
clear whether he withdrew because he had changed his mind or
because he had failed to achieve political success. "In
politics he proved to be a model of futility," Mr. Schulze
wrote in "Philip Johnson: Life and Work. "He was never much
of a political threat to anyone, still less an effective
doer of either political good or political evil."
In 1941, at 35, Mr. Johnson turned once and for all to the
field that would occupy him for the rest of his life and
enrolled at the Harvard Graduate School of Design to begin
the process of becoming an architect.
At Harvard, Mr. Johnson did what few students, even those of
great means, have been able to do: he actually built the
project he designed as a thesis. It was a house in the style
of Mies, its lot surrounded by a wall that merges into the
structure, and it still stands at 9 Ash Street in Cambridge,
Mass.
After wartime service in the United States Army - the F.B.I.
had investigated Mr. Johnson for his fascist leanings, but
the government decided he was sufficiently repentant to wear
the uniform (he never saw combat) - he returned in 1946 to
the Museum of Modern Art. At the same time he began to
slowly build up an architectural practice of his own,
combining it with his career as a writer and curator.
He designed a small, boxy house, also highly influenced by
Mies, for a client in Sagaponack, Long Island, in 1946, but
his first significant building, and still perhaps his most
famous, was not for another client at all but, like the
Cambridge house, for his own use: it was the Glass House in
New Canaan, completed in 1949 with its counterpoint, a brick
guest house.
The serene Glass House, a 56-foot-by-32-foot rectangle, is
generally considered one of the 20th century's greatest
residential structures. Like all of Mr. Johnson's early
work, it was inspired by Mies, but its pure symmetry, dark
colors and closeness to the earth marked it as a personal
statement: calm and ordered rather than sleek and brittle.
A Home Becomes a Museum
Over the years, Mr. Johnson added to the Glass House
property, turning it into a compound that became a veritable
museum of his architecture, with buildings representing each
phase of his career. A small, elegant white-columned
pavilion by the lake was built in 1963; an art gallery, an
underground building set into a hill, with pictures from Mr.
Johnson's extensive collection of contemporary art set on
movable panels, in 1965; the sculpture gallery of 1970, a
sharply defined, irregular white structure covered with a
greenhouselike glass roof; a library of stucco with a
rounded tower that from a distance looks like a miniature
castle (1980); a concrete-block tower, as much a piece of
sculpture as a building, dedicated to his lifelong friend
Lincoln Kirstein, the writer and New York City Ballet
co-founder (1985); a "ghost house" of chain-link fence,
honoring Mr. Gehry, who often used this material (1985); and
finally, what Mr. Johnson called "Da Monsta," an irregularly
shaped building of deep red with sharply curving walls,
finished in 1995.
The "Monsta" -he could not quite bring himself to call one
of his buildings a monster, but said its shape resembled
it - is set at the gate of the estate and was intended to
serve as a visitors center once the public was admitted to
the property after his death. The compound was willed to the
National Trust for Historic Preservation, which plans to run
it as a museum.
In addition to Mr. Whitney, Mr. Johnson is survived by a
sister, Jeannette Dempsey, now 102, of Cleveland.
After the Glass House was completed in 1949, Mr. Johnson
received other residential commissions, including a number
of houses in New Canaan. His first work on a very large
scale, however, was the Seagram Building, designed with
Mies. The deep bronze Seagram is considered by many critics
to be the finest postwar skyscraper in New York.
But by then, Mr. Johnson was growing impatient with the
limitations of the strict, austere Miesian vocabulary. He
began to explore a more decorative sort of neo-Classicism,
leading to designs like the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth
(1961), the New York State Theater at Lincoln Center (1964)
and the Bobst Library at New York University, designed in
1965 but not completed until 1973. His work in that period
led the architectural historian Vincent Scully to refer to
him as "admirably lucid, unsentimental and abstract, with
the most ruthlessly aristocratic, highly studied taste of
anyone practicing in America today."
"All that a nervous sensibility, lively intelligence and a
stored mind can do, he does," Mr. Scully said.
Mr. Johnson's art collecting brought him a nearly continuous
stream of commissions to design museums, and his ties to the
Museum of Modern Art brought him the request to design the
museum's 1951 and 1964 expansions beyond its original 1939
building, including the sculpture garden. He also designed
the original Asia House gallery on East 64th Street, now the
Russell Sage Foundation, as well as museums in Fort Worth;
Utica, N.Y.; Lincoln, Neb.; and Corpus Christi, Tex.
Despite his record as a museum designer and his long
association with the Modern, the museum's board, of which
Mr. Johnson was a member, decided in 1978 to hire a
different architect to design its new west wing. The job
went to Cesar Pelli, and Mr. Johnson was deeply hurt.
For some time, relations cooled between him and the museum
he had supported nearly since its founding, but eventually
they resumed, and Mr. Johnson and Mr. Whitney moved into the
apartment tower above the museum designed by Mr. Pelli. In
1984, as a tribute to Mr. Johnson as its founding curator,
the museum's department of architecture and design named its
exhibition space the Philip Johnson Gallery. And the Modern
observed Mr. Johnson's 90th birthday with a pair of
exhibitions: one of notable works of art that the architect
had donated to the museum, and another of works given by
architects in Mr. Johnson's honor. More recently, the
architect Yoshio Taniguchi set to work on his design for the
Modern's latest expansion, Mr. Johnson met occasionally with
him to chat about the challenges of blending old and new.
The beginnings of his late career as a major commercial
architect were not in New York, however, but in Minneapolis,
through an immense project in 1972 for Investors Diversified
Services, a financial conglomerate now part of American
Express. A square-block complex containing a roughly
octagonally shaped, 51-story glass tower, hotel and retail
wing placed around a central glass-covered court, the design
blended Mr. Johnson's interest in angular forms with a
sensitive urbanism. It quickly became a focal point for
downtown Minneapolis and was the first of a generation of
what might be called social skyscrapers: towers that did not
merely house office workers but also contained myriad public
spaces.
Among the many observers impressed by the tower was Gerald
D. Hines of Houston, a real estate developer who had begun
his career as a builder of warehouses but who by the early
1970's had sought to make a mark with much larger buildings
by prominent architects. Mr. Hines hired Mr. Johnson and Mr.
Burgee to design Pennzoil Place, a twin-towered complex of
glass in downtown Houston that was completed in 1976. One of
the most widely known skyscrapers in the country, Pennzoil
Place consists of two trapezoidal towers placed so as to
leave two triangular areas open on the site. These areas
were covered with steel and glass trusses to create
greenhouselike lobbies; as a further formal gesture, each
tower was given a slanted roof for the top seven floors.
Pennzoil Place would prove widely influential, but five
years later Mr. Johnson and Mr. Burgee moved away from it
with the design for one of the most startling skyscrapers of
the last generation, the AT&T headquarters in New York, the
so-called "Chippendale skyscraper" with a split pediment
resembling an antique highboy.
During the 1980's Mr. Johnson and Mr. Burgee also designed
major skyscrapers in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco
and Dallas, many for Mr. Hines. Most of them, following the
lead of the AT&T. Building, were lavishly finished in
granite and marble and imitated some aspect of architecture
of the past.
Mr. Johnson also designed the Crystal Cathedral in Garden
Grove, Calif., and the Museum of Television and Radio on
West 52nd Street in New York. With Mr. Burgee, he produced
plans through the 1980's for office towers for Times Square.
Widely criticized, they were never built. After the
dissolution of his partnership with Mr. Burgee, he formed
one with Alan Ritchie, a longtime associate, and produce
several works for Donald J. Trump, including the glass tower
at 1 Central Park West and projects for the Riverside South
residential development; and plans for a cathedral for a gay
congregation in Dallas. Mr. Johnson continued to go to work
at Philip Johnson/Alan Ritchie Architects in the Seagram
Building as recently as last year.
Though he gave up formal scholarship when he became an
architect, he continued to write and lecture frequently. His
constant theme, unchanged through all his stylistic
variations, was his belief in the need to view architecture
as an art, separating him from the socially minded early
Modernists whose cause he once championed so ardently.
In a famous lecture in 1954 at Harvard titled "The Seven
Crutches of Modern Architecture," he said, "Merely that a
building works is not sufficient." Later, in an oft-quoted
remark, he said, "I would rather sleep in Chartres Cathedral
with the nearest toilet two blocks away than in a Harvard
house with back-to-back bathrooms."
Years later, Mr. Johnson told an audience: "We still have a
monumental architecture. To me, the drive for monumentality
is as inbred as the desire for food and sex, regardless of
how we denigrate it."
But he ended by arguing: "Monuments differ in different
periods. Each age has its own.
"Maybe, just maybe, we shall at last come to care for the
most important, most challenging, surely the most satisfying
of all architectural creations: building cities for people
to live in."