People in Glass Houses
Philip Johnson
“Architects are pretty much high-class whores. We can turn down projects the way they can turn down some clients, but we've both got to say yes to someone if we want to stay in business” - Philip Johnson
Philip Johnson (1906-2005) was not a great modernist like Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969), and not even a particularly good architect (“I do not strive for originality,” he once said. “As Mies once told me, ‘Philip, it is much better to be good than to be original’.”); yet through a combination of deep pockets, independence of mind, a flair for publicity and political skills (the very embodiment of the American dream), he went on to became one of the most influential designers of the twentieth century. Charming, yet bitchy, he was admired and disliked in equal measure. The “doyen of architectural opportunists”, shamefully plagiarizing the ideas of his contemporaries, whilst at the same time, tirelessly promoted the work of those young architects whom he saw as worthy of his attention. A one-time fascist, anti-Semitic, anti-black, a misogynist and Nazi sympathizer, he paradoxically became a fixture of the New York Social scene, had Jewish colleagues and clients, numerous female friends and at least one black lover. An openly, and flamboyantly, gay man, his greatest success was at the very heart of America’s conservative post-war corporate environment. The American poet Dorothy Parker thought that a man need merely be “handsome, ruthless and stupid”. Not only that, Johnson was also manipulative, cynical and a publicity hound. As the impresario of twentieth-century architecture, Johnson was the apotheosis of banal urbanity, funny, witty, but ultimately heartless. For Johnson, to be boring was an unforgivable crime; ironic really, given some of his buildings, which are incomprehensibly dull.
Philip Johnson in 1964 sitting in front of his "Glass House,” designed in 1949, Photograph by Bruce Davidson
Seagram building (1957) designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson, photograph by Ezra Stoller
Born in Cleveland, Ohio, to a wealthy Wasp family, “If he did not arrive with a silver spoon in his mouth,” Mark Lamster writes in his biography of Johnson, “one was surely close at hand”. One of four children, Johnson shone at school and in 1923 he was admitted to Harvard without an exam. The following year his father, a corporate attorney, decided to distribute some of his considerable assets. His sisters got cash while Johnson acquired shares in the Aluminum Company of America. In the 1920s, when stock in ALCOA soared, he became wealthier than his father, a “millionaire, at a time when the word meant rich, not just comfortable.” Lonely, and troubled by his sexuality (of which his father would never fully approve), Johnson’s personal life was marred by depression. Taking time off from Harvard he started travelling to Europe as a means of escape, which is when he discovered his passion for modern art and architecture. After graduating with a degree in philosophy, he joined the fledgling Museum of Modern Art in New York (“MoMa”) as a curator. A preternaturally skilled organizer of architectural ideas, Johnson would go on to play a profound role in shaping the whole institution for the rest of the century.
With a keen eye for contemporary artists, he was responsible for the purchase or donation of several of its most iconic works, including Jasper Johns’ Flag (1954-1955) and Andy Warhol’s Gold Marilyn Monroe (1962). His inaugural exhibition of 1932, “Modern Architecture: International Exhibition”, one of the landmarks in the history of the built environment, effectively changed the course of design by reducing and re-framing the amorphous modernism of Walter Gropius (1883-1969), Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier (1887-1965) into an aesthetic that would come to be known as the International Style. The show’s attendance may have been modest (about thirty-three thousand visitors over six weeks) but its influence and pioneering are one of the reasons for Johnson’s meteoric rise to success. He was reintroduced to the public as the curator of architecture, and Johnson’s later exhibit for MoMA, “Machine Art,” in which he put everyday objects on display (airplane propellers, waffle makers, cash registers, toaster ovens, an entirely new idea), laid the groundwork for industrial design to be taken seriously by museums. Reviewers were all unequivocal in their admiration for Johnson, pronouncing him an “exhibition maestro,” “our best showman and possibly the world’s best.”
Perhaps no other American as successful as Johnson indulged a love for Fascism as ardently and as openly. While presenting a veneer of respectable intellectualism, he actively supported the more brutal representatives of the fascist cause in America. “You simply could not fail to be caught up in the excitement of it, by the marching songs, by the crescendo and climax of the whole thing, as Hitler came on at last to harangue the crowd,” Johnson told a friend after seeing an early Nazi rally in Potsdam. In 1934 he broke his association with MoMA to launch an ill-judged political career. Johnson latched onto the coat-tails of the odious Lousiana governor Huey P. Long, and then, when he was assassinated, the notoriously anti-Semitic Father Charles E. Coughlin, a soapbox demagogue from Michigan (who built his following with attacks on Roosevelt, the “Jew Deal,” and the “Jewspapers” that supported it); designing a tribune — based on the one from which Hitler spoke each year at the Nuremberg rally — from which the priest could broadcast his right-wing message.
Four Seasons restaurant, Seagram Building (1957) designed by Philip Johnson
Johnson’s foray into politics was short and inglorious, ending in complete failure. After the United States entered the war, Johnson’s commitments became liabilities. Yet with nearly all of his American Fascist friends and associates under indictment, the 34-year old Johnson managed to shrug off these fatuities as a kind of youthful infatuation, enlisting in the Army and organizing an anti-Fascist league at the Harvard Design School. “If you’d indulged every one of your whims that you had when you were a kid,” he told the interviewer Charlie Rose, “you wouldn’t be here with a job either.” He also took to repeating the awkward locution, “You know, far from being an anti-Semite. I’ve always been a violent philo-Semite.” (By the mid 1950s, in no spirit of atonement, he was designing a synagogue for Kneses Tifereth Israel, a congregation in suburban Port Chester, New York.)
Only in 1942, aged 36, would Johnson go on to train as an architect, enrolling at Harvard's graduate school of design. He quickly became infatuated by the modernism of Mies van der Rohe, Gropius’ successor at the Bauhaus (who had left Germany after failing to sell modernism to the Nazis) and now head of architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology. Much to Van der Rohe’s chagrin it was Johnson who created the first Miesian house in the United States — his boxy, glass-walled home in New Canaan, Connecticut in 1949, inspired by Van der Rohe's earlier 1945 sketches for the as yet unbuilt Farnsworth House. Somewhat grandiosely, Jonson traced its intellectual roots to Claude-Nicolas Ledoux (1736-1806), Karl Friedrich Schinkel (1781-1841), Le Corbusier, Theo van Doesburg (1883-1931), Kazimir Malevich (1879-1935), the Acropolis, and somewhat disturbingly, to a “burnt wooden village I saw once where nothing was left but foundations and chimneys of brick.” One questions whether he intentionally recreated the “stirring spectacle” (in Jonson’s words) that was the burning of Jewish shtetls he had witnessed driving through Poland with the Wehrmacht. When Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959) was asked by art critic Selden Rodman in the mid-1950s for his opinion of Johnson’s Glass House he replied, “Is it Philip? And is it architecture?”
Johnson would later make amends with Van der Rohe by suggesting the German architect to Phyllis Lambert – the woman responsible for finding an architect to design the Seagram Building, the darkly luminous, nonpareil skyscraper on New York’s Park Avenue. “[The Museum of Modern Art’s director] Alfred Barr turned Phyllis Lambert over to me,” Johnson would later recall. “She came and said, ‘How do I find an architect?’ I said, ‘I’ll drive you around the country, and we’ll find one.’ Then I sort of inched her over until she liked Mies the best. I didn’t say, ‘You’ve gotta pick Mies,’ but I was influential. That’s power, huh?” Mies repaid the favour by appointing Johnson as his assistant architect on the project which would reshape part of Manhattan in the modernist style.
Employing utopian design principles, Johnson helped to create one of the almighty monuments to US capitalism; and as the de facto epicentre of American architecture, he set up shop on the thirty-ninth floor. Along with many of the interior details, Johnson had been chiefly responsible for the famed Four Seasons restaurant (now, sadly, gutted), which he made his own. In keeping with Johnson’s philosophy, it was the most expensive restaurant in the city, where the “power lunch” was invented; his favourite spot for lunches, dinners and gossipy tête-à-têtes, he would dine there every day (as much a headquarters to him as his office upstairs), helping dispense commissions to some of the most important names in early-twenty-first-century architecture. (Johnson commissioned Rothko to create 500 to 600 square feet of mural-scale canvases for the smaller of the restaurant’s two dining rooms, but, after eating there with his wife, Mell, the artist reneged on the deal. “Anybody who will eat that kind of food for those kind of prices will never look at a painting of mine,” he seethed to a studio assistant. The canvases went into storage and years later, after a series of lengthy negotiations with the Tate, he donated a number of them to the museum. They still hang there today.)
Rockefeller guesthouse, New York (1950), designed by Philip Johnson
Johnson went on to become corporate America’s most successful architect, designing clever, soulless buildings “imbued with the dull complacency of wealth”, in Robin Middleton's phrase. For Johnson architecture was about art and style, not function and social responsibility. He once said in a 1999 interview with Esquire, “Comfort is not one of my interests. You can feel comfortable in any environment that’s beautiful.” He had little interest in modernism’s social concerns (much of the early modernist works were attempts to develop replicable, affordable housing) unless they benefited him; but adept at identifying the zeitgeist, he saw the potential for stripped-back, hard-edged architecture among the style-conscious socialites who comprised MoMA's influential committees and populated its cocktail parties.
In a 1961 London speech Johnson said: “You cannot not know history.” So, when in 1975 he was approached by the AT&T Corporation to design its headquarters at 550 Madison Avenue, he produced the so called “Chippendale skyscraper”. By this time, fickle and shallow as ever, Johnson had denounced the International Style as “boring, totally lacking in richness, totally wrong”. The rosy granite edifice of the AT&T building (later Sony Tower) earned Johnson a Time magazine cover story for what was essentially a light visual gag: the broken pediment that tops the building. “Not to put too fine a point on it, the building sucks,” wrote Village Voice critic Michael Sorkin. “AT&T is the Seagram Building with ears.” Whilst some may consider it a masterpiece of postmodernism (the first monument to that delirium of kitsch), perversely, it signalled an end to the movements avant-garde credentials and the beginning of its wholesale adoption all over the world as business architecture. From an aesthetic standpoint, it’s difficult to love; an architectural model realised at 1:1 scale rather than a real work of engaged urbanism.
Then when “deconstruction hit New York in the 1980s, just as he had promoted the European modernists, there was Johnson in his 80s in the thick of the theorists, networking, promoting favourites and talking, always talking”, giving a helping hand to Rem Koolhaas (b. 1944), Zaha Hadid (1950-2016) and Frank Gehry (b. 1929) (Johnson cried when he first saw the swooping, shimmering lines of Bilbao's Guggenheim Museum, a building credited with reviving an entire city). To his fellow architects, or some of them, Johnson was a kingmaker who thrust the profession into the public consciousness, the man who minted celebrities and virtually created the “starchitect”, which has both helped and hindered in shaping the trajectory of modern architecture. Starchitecture has given rise to the idea of the architect as lone genius (architecture is nothing if not collaborative), imposing his vision on the landscape, self-conscious landmarks to flatter their host cities, with disregard for client, context and audience.
Ultimately Johnson had a baleful influence on the business of architecture all over the world. His concern was aesthetic not social, and if it was social — symptomatic of his belief in the superiority of the rich over the poor — it concerned a more affluent strata of society. With a tendency toward theatricality and mercurial utopianism, he reduced architecture to a stage set, a stylish backdrop to unabashed corporate greed. When modernist austerity was “an aesthetic cause”, he was in the vanguard; when the “business of American architecture” seemed to be business, Johnson was its “slickest salesman”. His obituarist said he “a second-class creative figure with a first-class brain and boundless wealth, charm and wit”, was the “second to do everything”.