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Philip Johnson

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Philip Cortelyou Johnson (July 8, 1906– January 25, 2005) was an influential American architect. With his thick, round-framed glasses, Johnson was the most recognizable figure in American architecture for decades.

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 life partner David Whitney, who died only a few months later, on June 12, 2005.

Early life

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.

Johnson returned from Germany as a proselytizer for the new architecture. Touring Europe more comprehensively with his friends Alfred H. Barr, Jr. and Henry-Russell Hitchcock to examine firsthand 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.

As critic Peter Blake has stated, the importance of this show in shaping American architecture in the century "cannot be overstated." In the book accompanying the show, coauthored with Hitchcock, Johnson argued that the new modern style maintained three formal principles: 1. an emphasis on architectural volume over mass (planes rather than solidity) 2. a rejection of symmetry and 3. rejection of applied decoration. 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.

In the 1930s Johnson sympathized with Nazism, and expressed antisemitic ideas

During the Great Depression, Johnson resigned his post at MoMA to try his hand at journalism and agrarian populist politics. His enthusiasm centered on the critique of the liberal welfare state, whose "failure" seemed to be much in evidence during the 1930's. As a correspondent, Johnson observed the Nuremberg Rallies in Germany and 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.

The Glass House

The Philip Johnson Glass House is a site of the National Trust for Historic Preservation and now open to the public for tours at www.philipjohnsonglasshouse.org.

Designed by Philip Johnson (1906–2005) as his private residence, the Glass House (1949) sits on a 47-acre site in New Canaan, CT that features fourteen structures, a major collection of contemporary art, and a modern American landscape. The Glass House serves as an architectural survey of the second half of the twentieth century showcasing innovations in the field of modern architecture from each decade of Johnson’s storied career. Johnson donated the Glass House to the National Trust for Historic Preservation in 1986, retaining a life estate. Before his death in 2006, David Whitney, a renowned art collector, curator, art advisor, and Johnson’s long-time partner, directed his estate to support the National Trust’s preservation and programming of the Glass House.

The Glass House is best understood as a pavilion for surveying the surrounding landscape. Invisible from the road, the house sits on a promontory overlooking a pond with views towards the woods beyond. Each of the four exterior walls is punctuated by a centrally located glass door that opens onto the landscape. The house, which ushered the International Style into residential American architecture, is iconic because of its innovative use of materials and its seamless integration into the landscape. Johnson, who lived in the Glass House from 1949 until his death in 2005, conceived of it as half a composition, completed by the neighboring Brick House.

Since its completion in 1949, the building and decor have not strayed from their original design. Most of the furniture came from Johnson’s New York apartment designed in 1930 by Mies van der Rohe. In fact, Mies designed the iconic Glass House daybed specifically for Johnson. A 17th-century painting attributed to Nicolas Poussin graces the living room. The image, Burial of Phocion, depicts a classical landscape and was selected specifically for the house by Alfred H. Barr Jr., the first director of The Museum of Modern Art. The sculpture by Elie Nadelman is a small version of a marble sculpture that is found in the New York State Theater at Lincoln Center designed by Johnson in 1964.

The Seagram Building

After completing several houses in the idiom of Mies and Breuer, 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 commision towards Mies, working with Phyllis Lambert, the daughter of the CEO of Seagram. This synergistic collaboration of architects and enlightened client resulted in the remarkable bronze and glass tower on Park Avenue, whose strength of proportion, elegance of material, and constructional rigor led the New York Times to judge it the most important building of the twentieth century. Johnson's noted contributions were in the interiors, in particular the elegant Four Seasons restaurant.

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 and designing the New York State Theater of that complex. Meanwhile, Johnson began to grow beyond with the orthodoxies of the International Style he had championed...

Later Buildings

Although startling when constructed, the glass and steel tower (indeed many idioms of the modern movement) had by the 1960's 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. Many of these became instant icons, such as PPG Place in Pittsburgh and the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, California.

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 between 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. 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 Postmodernist 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.

Notable Works

Quotes

  • "I would rather stay in Chartres Cathedral with the nearest toilet two blocks away, than in a Harvard house with back-to-back bathrooms."
  • "Architecture is surely not the design of space, certainly not the massing or organization of volumes. These are ancillary to the main point, which is the organization of procession. Architecture exists in time."
  • "The job of the architect today is to create beautiful buildings. That's all." 1965.
  • On architects being known for long life spans: "Of course they live long -- they have a chance to act out all their aggressions."
  • "To be in the presence of a great work of architecture is such a satisfaction that you can go hungry for days. To create a feeling such as mine in Chartres Cathedral when I was 13 is the aim of architecture."
  • "Early unsuccessess shouldn't bother anybody because it happens to absolutely everybody."

Johnson wrote (Heyer, 1966):

The painters have every advantage over us today...Besides being able to tear up their failures—we never can seem to grow ivy fast enough—their materials cost them nothing. They have no committees of laymen telling them what to do. They have no deadlines, no budgets. We are all sickeningly familiar with the final cuts to our plans at the last moment. Why not take out the landscaping, the retaining walls, the colonnades? The building would be just as useful and much cheaper. True, an architect leads a hard life—for an artist.

...Comfort is not a function of beauty... purpose is not necessary to make a building beautiful...sooner or later we will fit our buildings so that they can be used...where form comes from I don't know, but it has nothing at all to do with the functional or sociological aspects of our architecture.

References

External links

References/Further reading

Gallery



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