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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.
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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 was descended from the Jansen (a.k.a. Johnson) 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 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.
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, Walter 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. Regarding this period in his life, he later said, "I have no excuse (for) such unbelievable stupidity... I don't know how you expiate guilt."
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 1930s. 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
Johnson's early influence as a practicing architect was his use of glass; his masterpiece was the Glass House (1949) he designed as his own residence in New Canaan, Connecticut, a profoundly influential work. 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.
The house sits at the edge of a crest on Johnson’s estate overlooking a pond. The building's sides are glass and charcoal-painted steel; the floor, of brick, is not flush with the ground but sits 10 inches above. The interior is an open space divided by low walnut cabinets; a brick cylinder contains the bathroom and is the only object to reach floor to ceiling.
Johnson continued to build structures on his estate as architectural essays. Offset obliquely fifty feet from the Glass House is a guest house, echoing the proportions of the Glass House and completely enclosed in brick (except for small round windows at the rear). It contains a bathroom, library, and single bedroom with a gilt vaulted ceiling and shag carpet. It was built at the same time as the Glass House and can be seen as its formal counterpart. Johnson stated that he deliberately designed it to be less than perfectly comfortable, as "guests are like fish, they should only last three days at most".
Later, Johnson added a painting gallery with an innovative viewing mechanism of rotating walls to hold paintings (influenced by the Hogarth displays at Sir John Soane's house), followed by a sky-lit sculpture gallery. The last structures Johnson built on the estate were a library and a reception building, the latter, red and black in color and of curving walls. Johnson viewed the ensemble of one-room buildings as a total work of art, claiming that it was his best and only "landscape project."
The Philip Johnson Glass House is a site of the National Trust for Historic Preservation and now open to the public for tours.
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 commission 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.
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 that complex's New York State Theater. Meanwhile, Johnson began to grow bored 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 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. 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 Mark Rothko to the Museum of Modern Art as well as Andy 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, including Minneapolis's IDS Tower. That building's distinctive stepbacks (called "zogs" by the architect) created an appearance that has since become one of Minneapolis's trademarks and the crown jewel of its skyline. In 1980, Johnson's world-famous Crystal Cathedral was completed in Orange County, California for Rev. Robert A. Schuller's famed megachurch, which became a Southern California landmark.
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. In 1987, Johnson was awarded an honorary doctoral degree from the University of Houston. The institution's Hines College of Architecture is also housed in one of Johnson's buildings.
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
- The Seagram Building, in collaboration with Mies van der Rohe, New York (1956);
- Expansion of St. Anselm's Abbey in Washington, D.C. (1960)
- Four Seasons Restaurant, New York City (1959);
- The Rockefeller Guest House for Abby Aldrich Rockefeller;
- The Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden at the Museum of Modern Art;
- New York State Theater at Lincoln Center, (with Richard Foster, 1964);
- Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas (1961, expansion in 2001);
- The New York State Pavilion for the 1964 New York World's Fair, 1964);
- The Kreeger Museum in Washington D.C. (with Richard Foster; 1967);
- The main campus mall at the University of Saint Thomas in Houston, Texas;
- Elmer Holmes Bobst Library of New York University);
- John F. Kennedy Memorial Plaza in Dallas, Texas (1970);
- The IDS Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota (1972);
- Art Museum of South Texas in Corpus Christi, Texas (1972);
- Boston Public Library (1973);
- The Museum of Art at Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute in Utica, New York;
- Fort Worth Water Gardens (1974);
- Thanks-Giving Square in Dallas, Texas (1976);
- John de Menil House, Houston (1950);
- The Neuberger Museum of Art at SUNY Purchase College;
- Evangelist Robert Schuller's Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, California (1980);
- , National Centre for the Performing Arts (India), Mumbai (1980).
- Metro-Dade Cultural Center in Miami, Florida, 1982;
- The Chapel of St. Basil and the Academic Mall at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, Texas;
- The Republic Bank Center in Houston, Texas) now rebranded Bank of America Center;
- The Transco Tower, now rebranded Williams Tower, Houston, (1983);
- The Cleveland Playhouse in Cleveland, Ohio (extension) (1983);
- The Wells Fargo Center (Denver) in Denver, Colorado (1983);
- PPG Place in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (1984);
- The Gerald D. Hines College of Architecture, University of Houston (1985);
- Puerta de Europa, Madrid, Spain) John Burgee Architects, Philip Johnson Consultant;
- 190 South LaSalle in Chicago John Burgee Architects, Philip Johnson Consultant;
- 191 Peachtree Tower, Atlanta, Georgia John Burgee Architects, Philip Johnson Consultant;
- 101 California Street, San Francisco, California; Johnson/ Burgee Architects;
- University of St Thomas St Basil Chapel (with John Manley, Architect) (1992);
- AEGON Center in Louisville, Kentucky (1993), John Burgee Architects, Philip Johnson Consultant;
- Comerica Tower in Detroit, Michigan (1993), John Burgee Architects, Philip Johnson Consultant;
- Das Amerikan Business Center, Berlin, Germany (1994);
- Visitor's Pavilion, New Canaan CT (1994);
- Turning Point, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio (1996).
- First Union Plaza, Boca Raton, Florida (2000).
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