It was easy to despise Philip Johnson, at least in the abstract. The rich boy from Cleveland once attended a Hitler rally. His postmodern skyscrapers ripped off just about every style in the history books. Yet it was impossible not to be charmed by him in person or to admire his enduring contributions to the art of architecture, which ultimately outweighed his foibles. He breathed fresh life into his once-stodgy profession and ushered it into its present golden age.
Johnson, who died Tuesday night at age 98 at the New Canaan, Conn., estate that is home to his famous Glass House, was a walking and talking contradiction. He gave us the glass box, then shattered it. He disdained ornament and traditional design, then proclaimed the necessity of knowing history. He was architecture’s wizened king and its wisecracking jester. He tongue could cut like a rapier, yet he could be disarmingly self-deprecating, as when I gingerly reminded him in 1992 that he had once dismissed Frank Lloyd Wright as the greatest American architect of the 19th Century.
“It was a mistake,” he laughed, his mischievous eyes sparkling behind those trademark round black glasses while we sat in the 95th-floor restaurant of the John Hancock Center. “I said that before the 1930s, before the Johnson Wax Administration Building [in Racine, Wis.], which is his greatest work, and Fallingwater [near Mill Run, Pa.], which is his greatest home. That all came after my stupid comment.”
Changed American skylines
The self-mockery was a veil. Johnson wielded enormous power, not only as a builder but also as a tastemaker. As much as he changed the contours of America’s skylines, from the Chippendale-topped AT&T (now Sony) Building in New York to the milk carton-shaped Pennzoil Place twin towers in Houston to the light-filled Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, Calif., his most lasting contribution may be the way he shaped how we think about architecture — and about architects.
There were celebrity architects before him, of course, most notably Wright and Stanford White. But Johnson set the bar for the modern, media-savvy “starchitect,” campingly posing like Moses on the cover of Time in the late 1970s after his newly unveiled AT&T design broke the modernist mold. That laid the groundwork for the current infatuation with Frank Gehry and even, perhaps, for the phenomenon of Michael Graves and his best-selling teapots.
Johnson was a pathbreaker and, more significantly, a rule-breaker, ditching the functionalist dictums of his great modernist mentor, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and restlessly moving to wherever he sensed the pulse of aesthetic action. Because of his endless flitting from style to style, Johnson developed no style that was distinctly his own. He was, he freely admitted, not a great architect, and his work varied widely in quality, despite the fact that he was the first recipient of his field’s Nobel, the Pritzker Architecture Prize.
Pennzoil Place, a pair of twin trapezoidal towers completed in 1976, was one of his best works, following Mies’ apartment high-rises at 860 and 880 North Lake Shore Drive, but with dramatically sawed-off tops. As you drove around these black pieces of minimalist sculpture on Houston’s elevated freeways, the void between them appeared and disappeared and the towers seemed to dance with one another, a pas de deux you witnessed from the freeway. Here, Johnson endowed architecture with a fourth dimension — time — and made fresh use of the element of “procession,” in which we experience buildings as we move through space rather than from a single fixed point.
As bracing as Pennzoil was, its economic success led to what was pejoratively termed “the commodification” of architecture — buildings that were nothing more than two-dimensional logos blown up to massive scale. They helped sell real estate. And as Johnson entered his post-modern phase, he indulged in facile borrowings from the history books — from the Chippendale top of AT&T to a Houses of Parliament-inspired glass skyscraper in Pittsburgh to his stale reiteration of Burnham and Root’s great Masonic Temple at the 190 South LaSalle office building in Chicago. These were cartoons, not architecture, and they ultimately marked him as a form-taker, not a form-giver.
Johnson cared little about how architecture functioned. While he designed great public spaces, such as the Crystal Court atrium at the base of the IDS Center in Minneapolis, his relentlessly narrow focus on architecture’s cutting edge ignored the broader issue of how the field might serve the poor and sick. So it was tempting to paint him as a villain, particularly because he seemed shamelessly willing to cozy up to power (whatever its ideology) if that would give him the chance to build his dreams.
So why did architects such as Gehry, who is Jewish, forgive him his flirtation with fascism, even if they never forgot it? (As Johnson’s biographer Franz Schulze documented, the architect expressed admiration for Hitler in the 1930s and even attended a Hitler rally in Potsdam in 1932.)
Their forgiveness, of course, had a lot to do with self-interest. Johnson heavily promoted their careers, inviting them to his Glass House and to his black-tie dinners at the Century Club in New York City. But, as they correctly observed, Johnson was a potent force for good. He championed ideals and put his energy, intellect and money — all of which were considerable — to work for them.
One little-known Chicago example: Johnson donated seed money in 1966 that allowed preservationists to save Henry Hobson Richardson’s John J. Glessner House, the austere mansion at 1800 S. Prairie Ave. that was a precursor of modern architecture.
Position of influence
But the bedrock of his reputation is his legendary career as founding director of the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art, where he co-organized the 1932 International Style exhibition that brought the crisp, machine-age forms of European architects such as Mies and Le Corbusier to America. The show’s impact, felt in the postwar construction boom, was enormous. It would be the first time — but not the last — that Johnson changed the world’s skylines.
Roughly three decades later, as Johnson took note of the rising public dissatisfaction with soulless glass boxes, he made his “you cannot not know history” proclamation to Yale architecture students. That architectural apostasy foreshadowed his AT&T Building of 1984, an overblown pastiche, which nonetheless became the Vatican of postmodernism (with Johnson as pope). And it brought in a new wave of skyscrapers with gables and finials and setbacks — all the things Johnson once professed to detest.
His subsequent flip-flop to the fragmented forms of Deconstructivism, made in a 1988 Museum of Modern Art exhibition that he curated, only confirmed that, if Johnson had any credo, it was the one expressed by 19th Century American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”
If Mies was a giver of forms and rules, Johnson was a shatterer. What he leaves us is a pluralistic world without aesthetic mandates, a world of seemingly endless choices, a world in which we are free to enjoy everything from Gehry’s exuberant curves of metal to Graves’ postmodern classicism — and to suffer the work of those less-talented designers who are helpless without rules to guide them.
For better and for worse, Johnson’s only constant was his search for beauty, stripped of such messy little matters as whether architecture worked or served society. Perhaps such beauty is hollow and superficial. But it also can be thrilling, as the present age of “spectacle” buildings attests. If the field needs to follow a new direction in the wake of his death, then surely it is the merging of style and substance, beauty and social obligation, found in the environmentally conscious “green” buildings of such masters as London’s Norman Foster.
“There is only one absolute today and that is change,” a 2002 monograph devoted to Johnson’s work stated. “There are no rules, surely no certainties in any of the arts. There is only the feeling of a wonderful freedom, of endless possibilities to investigate, of endless past years of historically great buildings to enjoy.”
Those great buildings may not be his buildings, but, at his best, Johnson opened the door for other architects to create them.
And he opened our eyes to see them.
