Philip Johnson

Philip Johnson born 8 July 1906 (d. 2005)

Philip Cortelyou Johnson was an influential American architect. With his thick, round-framed glasses, Johnson was the most recognisable figure in American architecture for decades. Part icon, part oracle, part stand-up comic, Johnson was a reliable source of wit and provocation.

In 1930, he founded the Department of Architecture and Design at MoMA and later (1978), as a trustee, he was awarded an American Institute of Architects Gold Medal and the first Pritzker Architecture Prize, in 1979. He was a student at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. When Johnson died in January 2005, he was survived by his long time partner, David Whitney, who died only a few months later, on June 12, 2005.

Johnson was born in Cleveland, Ohio. He attended the Hackley School, in Tarrytown, New York, and then studied at Harvard as an undergraduate, where he focused on history and philosophy, particularly the work of the Pre-Socratic philosophers. Johnson interrupted his education with several extended trips to Europe. These trips became the pivotal moment of his education; he visited Chartres, the Parthenon, and many other ancient monuments, becoming increasingly fascinated with architecture.

Then in 1928 Johnson met the Bauhaus architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who was at the time designing the German Pavilion for the Barcelona exhibition of 1929. The meeting was a revelation for Johnson and formed the basis for a lifelong relationship of both collaboration and competition. The pupil had finally found the master.

Johnson returned from Germany as a proselytiser for the new architecture. Touring Europe more comprehensively with his friends Alfred H. Barr, Jr. and Henry-Russell Hitchcock to examine first hand recent trends in architecture, the three assembled their discoveries as the landmark show The International Style: Architecture Since 1922 at the Museum of Modern Art, in 1932. The show was profoundly influential and is seen as the introduction of modern architecture to the American public. It introduced such pivotal architects as Le Corbusier, Gropius, and Mies van der Rohe. The exhibition was also notable for a controversy: architect Frank Lloyd Wright withdrew his entries in pique that he was not more prominently featured.

The definition of the movement as a "style" with distinct formal characteristics has been seen by some critics as downplaying the social and political bent that many of the European practitioners shared.

Johnson continued to work as a proponent of modern architecture, using the Museum of Modern Art as a bully pulpit. He arranged for Le Corbusier's first visit to the United States in 1935, then worked to bring Mies and Marcel Breuer to the US as emigres.

During the Great Depression, Johnson resigned his post at MoMA to try his hand at journalism and agrarian populist politics. His enthusiasm centred on the critique of the liberal welfare state, whose "failure" seemed to be much in evidence during the 1930s. As a correspondent Johnson observed the Nuremberg Rallies in Germany, he covered the invasion of Poland in 1939. The invasion proved the breaking point in Johnson's interest in journalism or politics - he returned to enlist in the US Army. After a couple of self-admittedly undistinguished years in uniform, Johnson returned to the Harvard Graduate School of Design to finally pursue his ultimate career of architect.

His early influence as a practicing architect was his use of glass; his masterpiece was a "Glass House" he designed as his own residence in New Canaan, Connecticut, a profoundly influential work (1949). The concept of a glass house set in a landscape with views as its real “walls” had been developed by many authors in the German Glasarchitektur drawings of the 1920s, and already sketched in initial form by Johnson's mentor Mies. The building is an essay in minimal structure, geometry, proportion, and the effects of transparency and reflection.

After completing several houses in the idiom of Mies and Breuer, Johnson joined Mies in the design of the 39 story Seagram Building (1956). This collaboration resulted in the remarkable bronze and glass tower on Park Avenue, whose strength of proportion, elegance of material, and constructional rigour led the New York Times to judge it the most important building of the twentieth century.

Completing the Seagram Building with Mies also decisively marked a shift in Johnson's career. After this accomplishment Johnson's practice enlarged as projects came in from the public realm - such as coordinating the master plan of Lincoln Center. Meanwhile, Johnson began to grow impatient with the orthodoxies of the International Style he had championed.

Although startling when constructed, the glass and steel tower (indeed many idioms of the modern movement) had by the 1960s become commonplace the world over. He eventually rejected much of the metallic appearance of earlier International Style buildings, and began designing spectacular, crystalline structures uniformly sheathed in glass.

Johnson's architectural work is a balancing act between two dominant trends in post-war American art: the more "serious" movement of Minimalism, and the more populist movement of Pop art. His best work has aspects of both movements. Johnson's personal collections reflected this dichotomy, as he introduced artists such as Rothko to the Museum of Modern Art as well as Warhol. Straddling these two camps, his work was seen by purists of either side as always too contaminated or influenced by the other.

From 1967 to 1991 Johnson collaborated with John Burgee, and from 1984 onwards with the second partner, Raj Ahuja. This was by far Johnson's most productive period certainly by the measure of scale - he became known at this time as builder of iconic office towers.

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

Johnson's publicly held archive, including architectural drawings, project records, and other papers up until 1964 are held by the Drawings and Archives Department of Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library at Columbia University, the Getty, and the Museum of Modern Art.