Something is most definitely amiss as the most influential architect in America shifts his trim figure ever so slightly and peers out the window of Chicago`s most up-in-the-clouds eatery.
Philip Johnson, the impish octogenarian with the very big, very round black glasses, can make out the world`s tallest office building, the 110-story Sears Tower, in the distance. But his dancing brown eyes can`t spot the skyscraper he designed-the 42-story, postmodern palace at 190 S. LaSalle St.
Its topside gables and gingerbread cresting are all but lost in the high- rise thicket of the Loop.
”I can`t see my building,” the 86-year-old New Yorker exclaims with mock seriousness from a corner table at The 95th, the fancy joint on the 95th floor of the 100-story John Hancock Center. ”We have to move this restaurant to where we can see my building.”
We`re scanning the skyline with the man who has had a hand in launching every major architectural style for the last five decades: the austere steel- and-glass boxes of the 1950s and 1960s; the excessive corporate monuments of the 1970s and 1980s; and the strangely dissonant designs that are on architecture`s cutting edge in the 1990s.
Johnson has done it with an extraordinary blend of money, taste and personality that has allowed him, more than any other figure, to dictate the course of American architecture.
As if to underscore his unofficial status as dean of the profession, more than 200 people, including architect Helmut Jahn, would show up at a program later that evening to hear Johnson discuss the state of his art.
But for now, this energetic, aristocratic native of Cleveland is chatting about Chicago, the first city of American architecture, and a couple of the heroic figures who made it so.
What does he remember most about Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, with whom he collaborated on New York`s Seagram Building?
”Mainly the martinis. He was a four-, five-martini man. He was much more entertaining after the martinis.”
How about Frank Lloyd Wright, whom Johnson once dismissed as the greatest American architect of the 19th Century?
”It was a mistake. I said that before the 1930s, before the Johnson Wax Administration Building (in Racine, Wis.), which is his greatest work, and Fallingwater (in Bear Run, Pa.), which is his greatest home. That all came after my stupid comment.”
On this gray fall day, he is immaculately turned out, as usual, making the decor of The 95th-crystal chandeliers, scalloped draperies and burnished oak chairs-seem tawdry by comparison.
His white hair: neatly clipped. His suit: a double-breasted, dark gray Armani. His cuff links: gold, by Paloma Picasso. His glasses: big and black-modeled after those worn by French architect Le Corbusier.
Johnson also wears a white shirt ”because I`m in Chicago,” he says, smirking slightly and drawing laughter from his tablemates. ”In New York, we wear colored shirts.”
He is sipping a glass of water, having picked through chicken salad during lunch with Christian Laine, director of the Chicago Athenaeum, an architecture and design museum.
Johnson is asked whether Laine has requested money or a favor.
”Both,” he shoots back. ”Money, a favor, approbation. . . . What else did Christian ask me to do?”
”A building!” Laine replies, proferring a written promise from Johnson to the effect that ”I will design your museum in Chicago.”
Never mind, for now, that this museum may be nothing more than a gleam in Laine`s eye. Johnson is waxing enthusiastic about giving Chicago another monument, even though his first and only one-190 S. LaSalle St.-didn`t win critical raves upon its debut in 1987.
”Chicago being the center of architecture in the world, I`d rather build here than anywhere,” he says. ”I`ve just opened a new office, you know. I`m looking for work.”
Johnson recently went through a very public, very nasty breakup with his longtime design partner, former Chicagoan John Burgee. One day in July, according to The Wall Street Journal, Johnson removed five Robert Venturi chairs and a black marble table from the New York office where he`d designed megabuck office towers like Pennzoil Place in Houston, the IDS Center in Minneapolis, and the AT&T Building in New York.
Burgee had ousted him-the end of a long-running conflict over control of their firm, and over who got credit for its high-profile high-rises.
Leaving an office that once boasted 70 architects and tens of millions of dollars in projects, Johnson opened a shop that has three designers, including himself, and a handful of small jobs, like a museum remodeling in Ft. Worth.
You`ve got to restart somewhere.
”Philip Johnson Architects,” he says, running his fingers across the letters on an imaginary nameplate. ”It`s wonderful seeing my name on the door. I`m like a 20-year-old again.”
When he was 18, his wealthy lawyer-father give him a gift of Alcoa stock. Before you could say ”aluminum,” the once-risky stock split endlessly, making him a rich man at a young age.
Soon, he was off to Europe to discover the pleasures of being able to sustain a social and intellectual life that fit his personality perfectly.
A ground-breaking exhibition
By 1932, the rich young chap had become enamored of architecture, and managed to put on a design show, ”Modern Architecture-International Exhibition” at the-then fledgling Museum of Modern Art in New York.
It was, bar none, the most influential American architectural exhibition of the 20th Century.
The show introduced the lean, crisp, thin-paned structures of modernism to a broader audience than ever. And once the economy picked up steam in the 1950s, the austere look of the International Style came to dominate skylines in America and around the world.
But Johnson eventually tired of the style he`d named. In 1978, he set the design world on its ear with his scheme for the granite-clad, postmodern AT&T Building in Manhattan. It put Johnson on the cover of Time, and it drove orthodox modernists crazy. Some said the split pediment at its summit made the tower resemble a Chippendale highboy.
AT&T set off another stylistic sea change, with the austere glass-box look giving way to towers clad with all manner of historical ornament: Greek columns, Egyptian pyramids, you name it.
A mere 10 years later, Johnson ditched postmodernism and helped the Museum of Modern Art put on another highly influential show, this one introducing a style called Deconstructivism.
Sure enough, the style-an approach to design that skews, bends, distorts, fractures and scatters the orthodox geometric shapes used in architectural form-making-found its way into the portfolios of architects who considered themselves au courant.
”To me, the great architecture in this country is still in the future,” Johnson says. ”We`ve had enough modern. Mies van der Rohe settled that very well, thank you, with all the great buildings he did.
”Since then, we`re having more more fun than Mies ever had. He was such a Puritan. He was such a difficult man.”
How so?
”Well, because he was so earnest. So convinced about being good and truthful and honest.
”Nobody`s that good.
”Of course, he was horrified when I went off” and abandoned the International Style. ”He didn`t speak to me anymore.”
Style or fashion?
That`s what bugs a lot of architects about Johnson: He puts his considerable clout behind one style, then drops it with the sort of in-last-year, out-this-year insouciance one tends to associate with dress
designers.
Critics claim that his obsession with style has turned architecture into little more than a succession of fashions-a field less concerned with the people who use buildings than the aesthetic agenda of the hotshots who design them.
It is a charge to which Johnson pleads guilty.
Sort of.
”I`m only interested in the cutting edge of architecture,” he says.
”It looks small to other people, but it looms large to me.
”Why do I change all the time? I think the world changes its mind faster than I do. I`m just trying to keep up.”
And what does he think of the stuff that has trickled down from the high plateau of design: the overwrought crowns that top skyscrapers, such as 311 S. Wacker Drive. The lifeless urban complexes, such as Illinois Center, that, in part, were brought into this world because of his infatuation with less-is-more architecture.
”You can`t help that,” he says of designers who can`t match the standards set by the masters or who do whatever developers tell them to.
”They`re going to do bad things anyway.”
And what, specifically, does he think of the skyscrapers outside the window of The 95th?
”My first reaction is that I like the Kevin Roche building,” he says, referring to the 50-story Leo Burnett Building at 35 W. Wacker Drive. Roche, a Connecticut-based architect, designed the hulking, leaden-looking structure.
You like that one?
”You pick a good one then.”
No, thanks.
”You see, as an architect, it`s very hard for me to pick among my friends. . . . Kevin Roche is a good friend. Needless to say, I think that`s not a good question (about new buildings on the Chicago skyline). But if I were a critic, I`d jump up and down and start screaming at some of these buildings.”
`Hard to say what I do`
How much longer does he expect to be designing? His father, Homer, lived to age 97.
”I won`t stop working until I`m 96. Then I`ll look around and see how I feel. . . . I have to have that, or I couldn`t get any jobs. If people thought I was going to pass on soon, why would they hire me?”
Will he be remembered as a great architect . . .
”No.”
. . . or as a great tastemaker?
”A tastemaker, perhaps. Or a critic, rather. Or a cultural figure. It`s hard to say what I do.”
Soon, it`s time for him to head to an appointment with Chicago developer John Buck, who commissioned Johnson to design 190 S. LaSalle St. back in the 1980s.
Johnson springs up from his chair, and, showing absolutely no sign of fatigue, poses for pictures with Laine and a companion. Then it`s down the elevator and onto the street.
He and his interviewer climb into a cab; the interviewer wants to make sure Johnson gets safely to the Racquet Club, 1365 N. Dearborn St., where he was to speak at the program mentioned above, put on by the Chicago Institute for Architecture and Urbanism.
Just one problem.
”You`re going to have to loan me the money (for the fare),” the rich architect blurts out. ”I`ve only got $100 bills.”
