Early Life and The Museum of Modern Art Exhibition
Early Life and The Museum of Modern Art Exhibition
Early Life and The Museum of Modern Art Exhibition
He is best
known for his works of Modern architecture, including the Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut,
and his works of postmodern architecture, particularly 550 Madison Avenue which was designed
for AT&T, and 190 South La Salle Street in Chicago. In 1978, he was awarded an American Institute
of Architects Gold Medal and in 1979 the first Pritzker Architecture Prize.[1]
Johnson was born in Cleveland, Ohio, on July 8, 1906, the son of a Cleveland lawyer, Homer Hosea
Johnson (1862–1960), and the former Louisa Osborn Pope (1869–1957), a niece of Alfred Atmore
Pope and a first cousin of Theodate Pope Riddle. He had an older sister, Jeannette, and a younger
sister, Theodate. He was descended from the Jansen family of New Amsterdam, and included
among his ancestors the Huguenot Jacques Cortelyou, who laid out the first town plan of New
Amsterdam for Peter Stuyvesant. He grew up in New London, Ohio[2] and attended the Hackley
School, in Tarrytown, New York, and then studied as an undergraduate at Harvard University where
he focused on learning Greek, philology, history and philosophy, particularly the work of the Pre-
Socratic philosophers. Upon completing his studies in 1927, he made a series of trips to Europe,
visiting the landmarks of classical and Gothic architecture, and joined Henry-Russell Hitchcock, a
prominent architectural historian, who was introducing Americans to the work of Le
Corbusier, Walter Gropius, and other modernists. In 1928 he met German architect Ludwig Mies van
der Rohe, who was at the time designing the German Pavilion for the 1929 Barcelona International
Exposition. The meeting formed the basis for a lifelong relationship of both collaboration and
competition[3][4]
In 1930 Johnson joined the architecture department of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
There he arranged for American visits by Gropius and Le Corbusier, and negotiated the first
American commission for Mies van der Rohe. In 1932, working with Hitchcock and Alfred H. Barr,
Jr., he organized the first exhibition on Modern architecture at the Museum of Modern Art.[5][additional citation(s)
The show and their simultaneously published book International Style: Modern Architecture
needed]
Since 1922 played an important part in introducing modern architecture to the American public. His
flirtation with fascism and the Nazi party was documented in Marc Wortman's 2016 book 1941:
Fighting the Shadow War. It was excerpted by Vanity Fair magazine.[6] When the rise of the Nazis in
Germany forced the modernists Marcel Breuer and Mies van der Rohe to leave Germany, Johnson
helped arrange for them to come to work in the United States.[7]
The amount of power he yearned for was inversely proportional to the amount he actually attained. In politics, he
proved to be a trifler, the dilettante he earlier feared himself to be, a model of futility who sought to find a messiah or
to pursue messianic ends but whose most lasting following turned out to be the agents of the FBI—who themselves
finally grew bored with him. In short, he was never much of a political threat to anyone, still less an effective doer of
either political good or political evil.
The Glass House (1949)
Seagram Building(1958)
IDS Center in Minneapolis (1973)
Johnson joined Mies van der Rohe as the New York associate architect for the 39-story Seagram
Building (1956). Johnson was pivotal in steering the commission towards Mies by working
with Phyllis Lambert, the daughter of the CEO of Seagram. The commission resulted in the iconic
bronze-and-glass tower on Park Avenue. The building was designed by Mies.The interiors of the
Four Seasons and Brasserie restaurants were designed by Johnson[16]
Further development[edit]
Following the Seagram Building He built several smaller projects in a more personal, expressive
style, with ornament touches and features far from the sobriety of the modernist style; the
Synagogue of Port Chester New York, with a plaster vaulted ceiling and narrow colored windows
(1954–56); the Art Gallery of the University of Nebraska with an array of symmetrical arcs (1963);
(the Roofless Church in New Harmony, Indiana with a mushroom-shaped roof covered with wood
shingles (1960). In 1960 he also built a severely modernist monastery building for in the expansion
of St. Anselm's Abbey in Washington, D.C.[17]
In the same period, Johnson won commissions to coordinate the master plan of Lincoln Center, New
York City's new arts center, and to design that complex's New York State Theater, built in a massive
and unadorned modernist style. He also undertook his first foreign commission, the modernist art
museum in Bielefeld, Germany, with a modernist facade clad in dark red stone, and a modernist
colonnade of slender pillars (1968).
In 1967 Johnson entered a new phase of his career, founding a partnership with architect John
Burgee. Johnson and Burgee won commissions for a series of new skyscrapers. including the IDS
Center in Minneapolis (1973), and the two matching towers, facing each other like bookends,
of Pennzoil Place in Houston, Texas. The two towers of Pennzoil Place have sloping roofs covering
the top seven floors and are trapezoidal in form, created to leave two large triangual aras on the site,
which are occupied with glass-covered lobbies designed like greenhouses. This idea was widely
copied in skyscrapers in other cities. [18] [3]
In the late 1970s Johnson applied landscape architecture to two significant projects in Texas.
The Fort Worth Water Gardens opened in 1974, creating an urban landscape where visitors
experience water in distinct ways. And in 1977 Johnson completed the spiraling white chapel and
meditation garden at Thanks-Giving Square in Dallas.
Center for the Fine Arts (now Miami Art Museum), downtown Miami (1983)
In 1980, Johnson completed a new building in a startling new style; The Crystal Cathedral in Garden
Grove, California, a soaring glass neo-Gothic megachurch for the Reverend Robert H. Schuller. It
became a Southern California landmark. In 2012 it was purchased by the Roman Catholic Diocese
of Orange to become the cathedral for Orange County.
It was one thing to build a glass cathedral in California, and another to build a corporate
headquarters skyscraper in the center of Manhattan, the showcase of modern architecture. Shortly
after the Crystal Cathedral, working in collaboration with John Burgee, he completed one of his most
recognizable buildings, the AT&T building (later named the Sony Building, and now 550 Madison
Avenue). Built between 1978 and 1982, a skyscraper with an eight-story high arched entry and a
split pediment at the top which resembled an enormous piece of 18th-century Chippendale furniture.
It was not the first work of Postmodern architecture—Robert Venturi and Frank Gehry had already
built smaller scale postmodern buildings, and Michael Graves had completed the Portland
Building in Portland Oregon (1980–82) two years before the AT&T Building; and most of the building
was in a traditional modernist style; but because of its Manhattan location and size it became the
most famous example of postmodern architecture.[19]
At about the same time as the AT&T Building, Johnson and Burgee completed other remarkable
postmodern skyscrapers; the Bank of America Center (Formerly Republic Bank Center) in Houston
(1983) and the PPG Place, the headquarters of the Pittsburgh Plate Glass company (1979–1984).
Both buildings combined modern materials, construction and scale with suggestions of traditional
architecture. The forms of PPG Place suggested the neogothic tower of the Houses of Parliament in
London, while the Bank of America Center appeared inspired, on a colossal scale, the stepped
houses of Flemish Renaissance architecture.[19]
DDC (Domus Design Collection) Showroom at New York City – Main Showroom
Honors[edit]
In 1978, Johnson was awarded an American Institute of Architects Gold Medal. In 1979 he became
the first recipient of the Pritzker Architecture Prize the most prestigious international architectural
award.[1]
In 1991, Johnson received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement.[22]
Personal life[edit]
In 1934, Philip Johnson met Jimmie Daniels, cabaret singer. Daniels was Johnson's first serious
relationship. The relationship lasted only one year and Johnson would recall later that "a terrible man
stole him away—who had better sex with him, I gather. But I was naughty. I went to Europe and I
would never think of taking Jimmie along."[23]
Johnson, at the age of ninety-eight, died in his sleep while at his Glass House retreat on January 25,
2005. He was survived by his partner of 45 years, David Whitney,[24][25][26][27]who died later that year at
age 66.[28]
Johnson was gay, and has been called "the best-known openly gay architect in America."[29] He came
out publicly in 1993.[29]
In his will Johnson left his residential compound to the National Trust for Historic Preservation. It is
now open to the public.
Quotations[edit]
"I got everything from someone. Nobody can be original. As Mies van der Rohe said, 'I don't
want to be original. I want to be good.'"[33]
"Don't build a glass house if you're worried about saving money on heating."[33]
"Everybody should design their own home. I'm against architects designing homes. How do I
know that you want to live in a picture-window Colonial? It's silly, but you might want to. Who am
I to say?"[33]
"Architecture is the arrangement of space for excitement".[33]
"Storms in this house (The Glass House) are horrendous but thrilling. Glass shatters. Danger
is one of the greatest things to use in architecture."[33]
"A room is only as good as you feel when you're in it".[33]
"Merely that a building works is not sufficient."[34]
"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."[3]
In popular culture[edit]
He is mentioned in the song "Thru These Architect's Eyes" on the album Outside (1995) by David
Bowie.
He appears in Nathaniel Kahn's My Architect, a 2003 documentary about Kahn's father, Louis Kahn.
[35]
Philip Johnson's Glass House, along with Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth House, was the subject
of Sarah Morris's 2010 film Points on a Line. Morris filmed at both sites over the course of several
months, among other locations including The Four Seasons Restaurant, the Seagram Building, Mies
van der Roheʼs controversial 860–880 Lake Shore Drive Apartments, and Chicagoʼs Newberry
Library.
He is mentioned in the song "Thru These Architect's Eyes" on the album Outside (1995) by David
Bowie.
He appears in Nathaniel Kahn's My Architect, a 2003 documentary about Kahn's father, Louis Kahn.
[35]
Philip Johnson's Glass House, along with Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth House, was the subject
of Sarah Morris's 2010 film Points on a Line. Morris filmed at both sites over the course of several
months, among other locations including The Four Seasons Restaurant, the Seagram Building, Mies
van der Roheʼs controversial 860–880 Lake Shore Drive Apartments, and Chicagoʼs Newberry
Library.