Philip Johnson

Johnson was born in Cleveland, Ohio, on July 8, 1906, the son of a 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. His ancestors include the Huguenot Jacques Cortelyou, who laid out the first town plan of New Amsterdam for Peter Stuyvesant. He grew up in New London, Ohio. He had a stutter and was diagnosed with cyclothymia. He attended the Hackley School in Tarrytown, New York, 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. He graduated in 1930. ==Career==

After graduation, With this fortune, in 1930 he financed the new architecture department of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and in 1932 he was named its curator. As curator 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. The show and their simultaneously published book International Style: Modern Architecture Since 1922, published in 1932, played a seminal role in introducing modern architecture to the American public. 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 work in the United States. He created a small organization called the Gray Shirts, styled after the Nazi Brownshirts. Sponsored by the German government, he traveled on a press tour which covered the invasion of Poland in 1939. Schulze dismissed these early political activities as inconsequential, concluding they merited "little more substantial attention than they have gained" and his politics "were driven as much by an unconquerable esthetic impulse as by fascist philosophy or playboy adventurism". Architecture school and Army service In 1941, at the age of 35, Johnson abandoned politics and journalism and enrolled in the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where he studied with Marcel Breuer and Walter Gropius, who had recently fled from Nazi Germany. It was used by Johnson to host social events and was eventually submitted as his graduate thesis; he sold the house after the war, and it was purchased by Harvard in 2010 and restored by 2016. In 1942, while still a student of the architecture school, Johnson tried to enlist with Naval Intelligence, and then for a federal job, but was rejected both times. In 1943, after his graduation from Harvard, he was drafted to the Army and was sent to Fort Ritchie, Maryland, to interrogate German prisoners of war. He was investigated by the FBI for his involvement with the German government, Coughlin and Lawrence Dennis, an American fascist economist, and was cleared for continued military service. where he spent the rest of his military service doing routine duties. ==Early Modernist period (1946–1960)==

File:Glasshouse-philip-johnson.jpg|The Glass House (1949) File:Living.jpg|Interior of the Glass House (1949) File:Farnsworth House by Mies Van Der Rohe - exterior-6.jpg|Farnsworth House by Mies (designed 1945–7) for comparison File:Four Seasons Restaurant- The Brilliant Pool Room.JPG|The Four Seasons Restaurant of the Seagram Building in its original form (1956) In 1946, after he completed his schooling and his military service, Johnson returned to the Museum of Modern Art as a curator and writer. At the same time, he began working to establish his architectural practice. He built a small house, influenced by the work of Mies, in Sagaponack, Long Island. In 1947, he published the first monograph in English on the architecture of Mies. In 1947, he curated the first exhibition of modern architecture of the Museum of Modern Art including a model of the glass Farnsworth House of Mies. In 1949, he began building a new residence, the Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut, which was completed in 1949. It was clearly influenced by Farnsworth House, an influence which Johnson never denied, but looked quite different. The Glass House is a 56-foot by 32-foot glass rectangle, sited 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. The New York Times described it in 2005 as "one of the 20th century's greatest residential structures. "Like all of 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." In December 1955, the state of New York denied an architect's license to Mies. He moved back to Chicago and put Johnson fully in charge of construction. Mies returned in late 1956 and finished the building. == Late Modernism (1960–1980) ==

File:St. Anselm's Abbey DC 03.JPG|Monastery building at St. Anselm's Abbey in Washington, DC (1960) File:Munson-Williams-Proctor_Arts_Institute,_Utica_NY.jpg|Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute in Utica, New York (1960) File:Sheldon Gallery (Lincoln, NE) from NE 1.JPG|Sheldon Museum of Art at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln (1963) File:David H Koch Theater (48269670522).jpg|The David Koch Theater at Lincoln Center in New York City (completed 1964) Throughout the 1960s, Johnson continued to create in the vocabulary of the modernist style, designing geometrical theatres, a monastery, art galleries and gardens. The Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute (1960) is a good example of his work in the period; it is supported by eight external ferro-concrete piers, or two on each side. The exterior structural members are clad in bronze and "black" Canadian granite. The windowless cube is set above the office areas, which recessed in a dry moat, giving a "floating" effect. A model of the building was exhibited in the United States Pavilion at the Brussels' World's Fair of 1958 as an example of the new trends in American architecture. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2010. Another major project of the period was the Atrium of the David H. Koch Theater (formerly the New York State Theatre, the home of the New York City Ballet, at Lincoln Center in New York. File:2017 Boston Public Library Johnson Building.jpg|The Johnson Building at Boston Central Library, Boston, Massachusetts (1972) after its 2016 renovation File:Pennzoil Place in Houston.JPG|Pennzoil Place in Houston, Texas (1970–1976) File:Building5 houston.jpg|Pennzoil Place from above File:The Paley Center for Media (48155560156).jpg|Paley Center for Media, New York (1991) In 1967, Johnson entered a new phase of his career, founding a partnership with architect John Burgee. He began to design office building complexes for large corporations. The most prominent of these was Pennzoil Place (1970–76) in Houston, Texas. The two towers of Pennzoil Place have sloping roofs covering the top seven floors and are trapezoidal in form, planned to create two large triangular areas on the site, which are occupied with glass-covered lobbies designed like greenhouses. This idea was widely copied in skyscrapers in other cities. The Johnson building of the Boston Central Library (1972) adjoins the original Boston library built in the 19th century by the celebrated firm of McKim, Mead & White. Johnson harmonized his building with the original landmark by using similar proportions and the same pink Milford granite. File:Fort Worth Water Gardens 2003.jpg|The Fort Worth Water Gardens, in Fort Worth, Texas (1974) File:Fort Worth Water Garden.jpg|The Fort Worth Water Gardens File:Dallas_Chapel_of_Thanksgiving_2008.jpg|The spiral chapel in Thanks-Giving Square in Dallas,Texas (1977) In the late 1970s, Johnson combined architecture and landscape architecture to create two imaginative civic gardens. The Fort Worth Water Gardens, which opened in 1974, is an urban landscape where visitors experience water in distinct ways. The gardens cover 4.3-acres (1.7 hectares), and comprise three very different kinds of water features. First, a quiet meditation pool, surrounded with cypress trees and high walls, with a thin sheet of water cascading downward to the pool, making the sound of a rain shower. The second pool is an aerating pool with multiple illuminated spray fountains, beneath a grove of oak trees. The third fountain is the Active Pool, which challenges fit visitors to walk down to the pool at the bottom, with water cascading all around them. In 1977, Johnson completed a much quieter garden in Dallas, Thanks-Giving Square. It features a non-denominational chapel in a spiral form, a meditation garden and cascading fountains, tucked between buildings in the center of the city. == Postmodern period (1980–1990) ==

File:Crys-ext.jpg|The Crystal Cathedral (finished 1980) File:Crystal Cathedral 01-15Aug80.jpg|Interior of the Crystal Cathedral File:CrystalCathedral.jpg|Interior of the Cathedral in 2004 In 1980, Johnson and Burgee completed a cathedral in a dramatic new style: the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, California, is a soaring glass megachurch originally built for the Reverend Robert H. Schuller. The interior can seat 2,248 persons. It takes the form of a four-pointed star, with free-standing balconies in three points and the chancel in the fourth. The cathedral is covered with more than 10,000 rectangular pieces of glass. The Glass panels are not bolted, but glued to the structure, with a silicon based glue, to give it greater ability to resist Southern California earthquakes. Johnson and Burgee designed it to withstand an earthquake of magnitude 8.0. The tower was added in 1990. The cathedral quickly became a Southern California landmark, but its costs helped drive the church into debt. When the church declared bankruptcy in 2012, it was purchased by the Roman Catholic Diocese of Orange and became the Roman Catholic cathedral for Orange County. Working with John Burgee, Johnson did not confine himself to a single style and was comfortable mixing elements of modernism and postmodernism. For the Cleveland Play House, he built a Romanesque brick structure. His skyscrapers in the 1980s were clad in granite and marble and usually had some feature borrowed from historic architecture. In New York he designed the Museum of Television and Radio (now the Paley Center for Media) (1991). File:Sony Building by David Shankbone crop.jpg|550 Madison Avenue (1982) File:550 Madison Avenue July2015.JPG|Top of 550 Madison Avenue File:Sony Building by Matthew Bisanz.jpg|Window of 550 Madison Avenue File:AT&T(Sony)building-NY-1.jpg|Entrance of 550 Madison Avenue In 1982, working in collaboration with John Burgee, he finished one of his most famous buildings, 550 Madison Avenue (first known as AT&T Building, then the Sony building before taking its present name). Built between 1978 and 1982, it is a skyscraper with an eight-story high arched entry and a split pediment at the top which resembles an enormous piece of 18th-century Chippendale furniture. It was not the first work of postmodern architecture, as Robert Venturi and Frank Gehry had already built smaller scale postmodern buildings, and Michael Graves had completed the Portland Building (1980–82) in Portland, Oregon, two years earlier. But the building's Manhattan location, size, and originality made it the most famous and recognizable example of postmodern architecture. It was designated a city landmark by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission in 2018. File:Building4 houston.jpg|TC Energy Center (formerly Bank of America Center) in Houston, Texas (1983) File:Bank of America Center Houston 1.jpg|The TC Energy Center, Houston (1983) File:Oneppgplace.jpg|PPG Place, Pittsburgh, (1984) Between 1979 and 1984, Johnson and Burgee built PPG Place, the postmodern headquarters of the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company. It is a complex of six buildings within three city blocks, covering five and a half acres. The centerpiece is the 40-story tower, One PPG Place, which has a crown of spires at the corners which suggest the neogothic tower of the Houses of Parliament in London. During the 1980s, Johnson and Burgee completed a series of other notable postmodern landmarks. The TC Energy Center (formerly Republic Bank Center, later, Bank of America Center), in Houston (1983), was the first postmodern skyscraper in the Houston skyline. Fifty-six stories high, it has two setbacks creating what appear to be three different buildings, one against the other. The three triangular gables were inspired by Flemish Renaissance architecture. The interior and exterior are covered with rough-textured red granite, which also covers the surrounding sidewalks. File:UH Architecture Building.jpg|Hines College of Architecture at the University of Houston (1985) File:Lipstick Building (51923067068).jpg|The elliptical Lipstick Building in Manhattan, (1986) File:AegonCtr2030.JPG|The concrete tower and cupola of 400 West Market in Louisville, Kentucky (1993) The new building for the Hines College of Architecture (1985) of the University of Houston paid homage to forms drawn from earlier periods of architectural history, using modern materials, construction methods, and scale. The facade of the Hines building resembles, on a larger scale, the neoclassic facades of the French architect Claude Nicolas Ledoux. 400 West Market (1993) in Louisville, Kentucky, is a 35-story office tower built of reinforced concrete rather than the typical steel. It is topped by a concrete cupola, a vestige of the building's original owner and builder, Capital Holding. In 1986, Johnson and Burgee moved their offices into one of their new buildings, the elliptical Lipstick Building at 885 Third Avenue in New York, nicknamed because of its resemblance to the color and shape of a stick of lipstick. A feud was beginning between the two architects, with Burgee demanding greater recognition. As their business flourished and number of clients grew, the feud between Burgee and Johnson continued to grow. In 1988, the firm's name was changed to John Burgee Architects with Johnson as the "design consultant". In 1991, Johnson responded by establishing his own firm. The feud ended badly for Burgee; he was saddled with all of the firm's debts, while Johnson no longer had any responsibility. Burgee was eventually forced to declare bankruptcy and to retire, while Johnson continued to get commissions. ==Later career and buildings (1991–2005)==

File:Comericatower.jpg|Ally Detroit Center in Detroit, Michigan (1991–1993) File:191 Peachtree Westin cropped.jpg|191 Peachtree Tower in Atlanta (1991) File:Chapel of St. Basil.png|Chapel of St. Basil at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, Texas (1992) File:Da-monsta-philip-johnson-glass-house.jpg|"Da Monsta" entry pavilion for the Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut (1995) File:PlazaCastillaMadrid.JPG|Gate of Europe towers in Madrid, Spain (1989–96) File:190 South LaSalle Street, Chicago.jpg|190 South LaSalle in Chicago, Illinois (1987) File:Philip Johnson Majlis Qatar.jpg|Private majlis in Al-Shahaniya, Qatar After four years as a solo practitioner, Johnson invited Alan Ritchie to join him as a partner. Ritchie had been a partner for many years in the Johnson-Burgee office and was the partner-in-charge of the AT&T building and the 190 South LaSalle office building, a skyscraper designed as an homage to the demolished Masonic Temple of Chicago. In 1994, they formed the new practice of Philip Johnson-Alan Ritchie Architects. During the next 10 years, they worked closely together and explored new directions in architecture, designing buildings as sculptural objects. The Gate of Europe in Madrid (1989-1996) was originally a collaboration with Burgee and one of his rare works in Europe. It features two office buildings leaning toward each other, the first example of this style, which spread to America. The towers are 26 stories each, and both lean by 15 degrees from vertical. 191 Peachtree Tower in Atlanta was a project begun with Burgee. It is composed of two 50-story towers joined and crowned with two classical pavilions. The Comerica Tower (1991-1993) was also begun with Burgee. Like their earlier Postmodern works, it featured elements borrowed from historical architecture, particularly the triangular gables, borrowed from Renaissance Flemish architecture. It is the second tallest building in the state of Michigan. The Chapel of St. Basil at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, Texas (1992) is a notable late work. The design includes a domed chapel, a campanile, and a meditation garden, a labyrinth. Its structure is a combination of the basic forms: a cube, a sphere, and a plane. The cube contains the worship area, beneath a semi-sphere, which is presented as the symbolic opening to heaven. The vertical rectangular granite plane divides the church and opens the chapel to light. During daytime the interior is lit entirely with natural light. In 1995, Johnson added a postmodern element to his own residence, the Glass House. This was a new entry pavilion in a sculptural form, which he called the "Monsta", or "Monster". Other late works include the Cathedral of Hope in Dallas, the Habitable Sculpture (a 26-story apartment tower in Lower Manhattan, the Children's Museum in Guadalajara, Mexico, and The Chrysler Center. File:Urbanglasshouse.png|The Urban Glass House condominiums in New York (2006) File:The Ware Center Millersville University.jpg|The Ware Center in Lancaster, Pennsylvania (2008) The Urban Glass House in Lower Manhattan was one of last designs with Alan Ritchie, and was not completed after Johnson's death. It is a condominium building in lower Manhattan whose form was inspired by Johnson's most famous early work, the Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut. The final building he designed with Richie was the Pennsylvania Academy of Music building in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, which was completed in 2008, three years after his death. ==Honors==

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. ==Personal life==

Johnson was gay. He came out publicly in 1993, and was regarded as "the best-known openly gay architect in America". In 1934, Philip Johnson began his first serious relationship with Jimmie Daniels, a cabaret singer. The relationship lasted one year. Johnson died in his sleep at his Glass House retreat on January 25, 2005, at the age of ninety-eight. His partner of 45 years, David Whitney, died later that year at age 66. Johnson was among the public figures at the core of the effort to save Olana, the home of Frederic Edwin Church, before it was dedicated a National Historic Landmark in 1965 and subsequently became a New York State Historic Site. In his will Johnson left his residential compound to the National Trust for Historic Preservation. It is now open to the public. ==Art collection and archives==

As an art collector Johnson had an eclectic eye. He supported avant-garde movements and young artists often before they became widely known. His collection of American art was strong in Abstract expressionism, Pop Art, Minimalism, Neo-Dada, Color Field, Lyrical Abstraction, and Neo-Expressionism and he often donated important works from his collection to institutions like MoMA, and other important private museums and University collections like the Norton Simon Museum, the Sheldon Museum of Art and the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University among many others. 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. ==Controversy over political activities==

Reviewing Franz Schulze's biography of Johnson, Kazys Varnelis wrote that "between 1932 and 1940, Johnson was an antisemite, fascist sympathizer, and active propagandist for the Nazi government." According to Varnelis, "Johnson makes no apologetic gesture toward his past behavior unless he is confronted by direct questioning, nothing even as paltry as an open letter accounting for and regretting his past actions and condemning the motives that led him to them". and writing for three periodicals, including Charles Coughlin's Social Justice, whose "almost every issue contained articles about the 'Jewish conspiracy' or about destructive economic forces led by figures with Jewish names". Because his family had a home in Germany and spent their summers there, Johnson traveled there frequently. As a Social Justice correspondent, he covered the huge Nazi rally at Nuremberg and the 1939 invasion of Poland with approval. The American correspondent William L. Shirer, traveling with him on the Nazi-sponsored press tour, labeled him in Berlin Diary, as "the American fascist" and suspected him of spying for the Germans. On the same tour, three weeks after Poland fell to the Nazis, Johnson, with Shirer, "was with German troops at the front as the guest of the Propaganda Ministry". He wrote to a friend that "The German green uniforms made the place look gay and happy... There were not many Jews to be seen. We saw Warsaw burn and Modlin being bombed. It was a stirring spectacle." In his Social Justice report on his trip to Poland, Johnson declared that the German victory amounted to an unmitigated triumph for the Polish people and that nothing in the war's outcome need concern Americans. Johnson went on to say that German forces had not significantly harmed Polish civilians, and said that "99 percent of the towns I visited since the war are not only intact but full of Polish peasants and Jewish shopkeepers." He said reports of Nazi mistreatment of Poles was "misinformed". Johnson was later investigated by the FBI, but no charges were brought against him, and he was cleared for military service. In 1956, he donated a design for Congregation Kneses Tifereth Israel in Port Chester, New York. Architecture professor Anat Geva observed in a paper that "all critics agree that his design of the Port Chester Synagogue can be considered as his attempt to ask for forgiveness." He discussed his trips to Germany and his infatuation with fascism in a 1996 interview with Charlie Rose. He said, "It was the stupidest thing I ever did, and I never forgive myself and I never can atone for it. There's nothing I can do... That's been torture to me ever since." He admitted to Rose that, while he had "difficulty" with Franklin D. Roosevelt because of his inability to achieve what he set out, he "worshiped the man" and "voted for him four times." In a 2020 article in Elle Decor magazine, articles editor Charles Curkin asked Pritzker Prize laureate Balkrishna Doshi if the architecture world was due for a reckoning, citing the Museum of Modern Art's chief architecture and design curatorship still being named after Johnson. Doshi replied that "Life itself is due for a reckoning, and architects must give respect to life." In 2020, Johnson's name was dropped from the Harvard University Philip Johnson Thesis House, which was designed by Johnson. Sarah Whiting, dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Design, announced the change on December 5, 2020, citing Johnson's "widely documented white supremacist views and activities." ==Quotations==

• "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.'" • "Don't build a glass house if you're worried about saving money on heating." • "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." ==In popular culture==

Johnson is mentioned (along with fellow architect Richard Rogers) 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. 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. ==See also==