Philip Johnson Is Dead at 98; (Gay) Architecture's Restless Intellect
MuckTheDuck
Arts
January 27, 2005
Philip Johnson Is Dead at 98; Architecture's Restless Intellect
By PAUL GOLDBERGER
Philip Johnson, at once the elder statesman and the enfant terrible of
American architecture, died Tuesday 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."
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
MuckTheDuck
Books
May 29, 2003
American Culture's Debt to Gay Sons of Harvard
By DINITIA SMITH
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/29/books/29HARV.html?ex=1107925831&ei=1&en=145f48d68979d478
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — George Santayana, F. O. Matthiessen, Lincoln
Kirstein, Leonard Bernstein, Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, Philip
Johnson: all of them Harvard men — professors and students — and all of
them gay or bisexual. But is that news?
"The fact that, individually, they were gay is not news," said Douglass
Shand-Tucci, the author of "The Crimson Letter: Harvard, Homosexuality
and the Shaping of American Culture," recently published by St.
Martin's Press. "But the Harvard gay experience is more important in
the shaping of American culture, because, in so many ways, Harvard is
more important."
Harvard being Harvard, one could make a list of prominent people with
ties to the university in almost any category — alumni from Cincinnati,
say, or Jews, or blacks. Still, Mr. Shand-Tucci says there is an
important untold story about the singular environment Harvard provided
for gays and how it shaped their later contributions to American
culture.
Harvard, of course, has viciously discriminated against gays in the
past. Last year a writer for The Harvard Crimson discovered records
from 1920 of a secret university court that had persecuted homosexuals,
apparently driving two to suicide. But Mr. Shand-Tucci argues that
despite harassment, Harvard's atmosphere was also creatively and
intellectually fertile for gays.
The biggest factor in the evolution of Harvard's gay culture, Mr.
Shand-Tucci said, was the university's proximity to Boston, which was
the nation's intellectual capital at least until the turn of the 20th
century. Gay Harvard men had access to the city's rich cultural and
intellectual life. New Haven, he said, was a provincial town, Yale's
presence notwithstanding; Princeton was deliberately built away from
big-city temptation. But Boston also had a liberal tradition and
thriving Bohemian culture, "a synonym for gayness," Mr. Shand-Tucci
said, with many bars and venues where gay men met.
Another aspect of Harvard that nourished gay culture, Mr. Shand-Tucci
said, was the Socratic tutorial, which can lead, as it did at Oxford
and Cambridge, to intense teacher-student relationships.
Mr. Shand-Tucci, Harvard '72, was interviewed amid the paneled walls,
oil paintings and tasseled curtains of the Harvard Faculty Club. With
his tweedy dress he could be a professor. But he has a mischievous air.
"There are two Douglasses," he said. "One respectable. One not." He
admits to being "50-something," and says he suffers from "unrequited
love" for another man.
He speaks in the drawl of a Boston Brahmin, which he almost is. He was
raised in "genteel poverty," he said. His father, John, was
Italian-American, Harvard '32, a prominent anesthesiologist. His
mother, Geraldine, a social worker, was Scotch and German. They
divorced when Mr. Shand-Tucci was 10, and the family's mansion was
divided into a rooming house. Today, the relics of his patrimony —
portraits, faded rugs, old furniture — are crammed into his studio
apartment.
He came to his history of gay Harvard by way of his 1998 book "The Art
of Scandal: The Life and Times of Isabella Stewart Gardner," about the
19th-century art collector. "She and Santayana were the presiding
geniuses of gay Harvard," he said. He is also author of "Boston
Bohemia, 1881-1900," a biography of the architect Ralph Adams Cram, and
of the official Harvard Campus Guide.
In "The Crimson Letter" Mr. Shand-Tucci builds on the work of other
scholars to describe how gay Harvard men were exposed to a world of
learning and artistic achievement. Gay faculty members mentored gay
students, gays formed friendships, collaborated and became patrons of
the arts.
Among prominent Harvard gay men whose stories Mr. Shand-Tucci recounts
is Professor F. O. Matthiessen, who virtually created the field of
American literature with his book "American Renaissance: Art and
Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman." Mr. Shand-Tucci cites
"Gaiety Transfigured: Gay Self-Representation in American Literature"
by the scholar David Bergman to argue that "American Renaissance" was a
direct result of Matthiessen's 20-year love affair with the painter
Russell Cheney. Cheney encouraged Matthiessen's interest in Whitman.
That book, Mr. Shand-Tucci said, was the ultimate expression of
Matthiessen's love for Cheney and a secret celebration of the gay
artist. Matthiessen committed suicide in 1950 after Cheney's death.
Citing O'Hara's biographer Brad Gooch, Mr. Shand-Tucci writes that the
intense friendship between O'Hara and his fellow undergraduate Mr.
Ashbery contributed to the development of postmodernism. Mr.
Shand-Tucci describes the two wiling away hours in the 1950's,
discussing high and low culture, everything from Schoenberg to
Hollywood.
Leonard Bernstein "was introduced at Harvard to the glories of Western
classical music," Mr. Shand-Tucci said. "He had an affair with the
conductor Dimitri Mitropoulos, who was visiting Boston." Mr.
Shand-Tucci said that a tutor took Bernstein to a concert in New York
where he met Aaron Copland, who was not a Harvard student but "with
whom he had an affair, and who stayed with him in his dorm."
"His experience at Harvard solidified him as a gay man," Mr.
Shand-Tucci said, though Bernstein later married and had children.
Another bisexual Harvard man, Lincoln Kirstein, went on to be
co-founder with Balanchine of the New York City ballet. He was also
co-founder with Varian Fry at Harvard of the magazine Hound & Horn. The
art historian Henry-Russell Hitchcock published an article in the
magazine on the decline of architecture. Another gay Harvard man, the
future architect Philip Johnson, read the article, became Hitchcock's
friend, and together they developed what became known as the
International Style.
Kirstein later repudiated Boston and Harvard. Nonetheless, he wrote
that his "identification with a society of living and thinking New
England dynastic actors gave a security and assurance prompting freedom
of action."
Mr. Shand-Tucci points out that three gay or bisexual former Harvard
graduate students changed the course of gay history. Alfred Kinsey, who
is said to have been bisexual, by asserting in the Kinsey Report that
10 percent of men had homosexual experiences, made it difficult to
consider homosexuality a crime anymore, Mr. Shand-Tucci said. Franklin
Kameny helped lobby the American Psychiatric Association to remove
homosexuality from the list of psychiatric illnesses. And the historian
John Boswell made it more difficult to consider homosexuality a sin,
Mr. Shand-Tucci said, by depicting the church's sanctioning of gay
relationships in his book "Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe."
Some may disagree with Mr. Shand-Tucci's broad definition of
homosexuality, which includes those who have sex with both men and
women, and "the ideal of the platonic, that homosexuality is the
highest and purest kind of love, more so than opposite-sex love." And
some of Mr. Shand-Tucci's assertions may raise hackles. The historian
Martin Duberman, who has written of his experiences as a Harvard
graduate student, is writing a biography of Kirstein. He has not read
Mr. Shand-Tucci's book, but he said: "I was certainly not nurtured at
Harvard. Instead, I was hounded and belittled." As for Boston's gay
culture, he said, "In the mid-1950's there were only two gay bars in
Boston." He added, "In Cambridge there wasn't anything."
Mr. Shand-Tucci said: "There are not more gays at Harvard than anyplace
else. But when you put together that such an enormous number of gay men
who influenced the arts and culture came out of Harvard, it is a
significant phenomena."
Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company
Cheeky Bastard
Here is a picture
http://www.ou.edu/class/arch4443/ConArchModArchAlmostNothing/Johnson%20Glass%20House.jpg
New Caanan, Connecticut
Date 1949
Building Type architect's house
Construction System steel frame with glass
Climate temperate
Context suburban
Style Modern
Notes "The Glass House", with open plan, bath in brick cylinder. Basic
concept from Mies van der Rohe
Da Monsta
Visitors Pavilion/Gate House
New Canaan, Connecticut
Philip Johnson's extraordinary home in New Canaan, Connecticut, the Glass
House, will eventually be open to the public through the National Trust for
Historic Preservation. As preparation for this, Johnson designed a visitors
pavilion, or gate house, that now sits at the entry to the property. His
name for the sculpture-like building is Da Monsta, a reference to the
structure's animal -like qualities. Johnson has described it as having a
flank, like a horse, which deserves a pat.
The building contains two rooms. The first is a reception area and waiting
room. The second is a video room, where visitors will watch films and videos
on Johnson and his work. These straightforward functions are enclosed in a
sculpture, painted bright red and black, which Johnson claims is a reference
to local New England architecture. The sculpture is a reinforced concrete
shell formed using steel mesh, a layer of insulation, sprayed-on concrete,
and a waterproof finish of acrylic. The system, which remains sufficiently
flexible during construction, allowed for Mr. Johnson to change forms and
edges of the shell before it settled into permanent shape.
The only two openings to the shell, the glassy entrance and a small window
in the waiting area, are non-Euclidean in shape. Johnson claims his
influence here came from German Expressionism and the artist Frank Stella.
The interior has white walls and a concrete floor. The little building is
nine feet tall at its lowest point and twenty-one feet tall at its highest
point. Like all of the pavilions at the Glass House, this building
represents Johnson's artistic exploration of the moment.
Completion Date: 1995
(Philip Johnson Architects)
http://www.pjar.com/projects_type_residential_top.html#
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