Philip Johnson 1906-2005

Nearly all of Philip Johnson's obituaries have identified him first and foremost as an architect, so the record is likely to read that way for some time to come. Yet there is cause to believe that cultural historians will eventually reassess and reorder his accomplishments. One could argue, for instance, that he made his greatest contribution to the cause of architecture through his role, lasting more than half a century, in the fortunes of the Museum of Modern Art. In 1932, at age 26, well before he ever designed a building, he was the curatorial force behind "Modern Architecture: International Exhibition," which brought to the attention of the American public the European modernist pioneers Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius, and effectively made their architecture the gold standard of the day. As the first director of the first department of architecture in any major American museum, he went on in 1934 to organize another exhibition of consequence, "Machine Art," in which he convincingly made the claim, virtually without precedent, that common, manufactured, anonymous objects could be not only functional but formally beautiful. In catalogue essays for both these events and others of the period, he produced his first writings, which eventually marked him as a significant critic and historian.

In the mid-1930s, Johnson resigned his post at MOMA and became involved with international politics. Unlike the many American intellectuals who favored leftist solutions to the profound economic problems of the time, he turned right, aggrandizing fascism in general and Adolf Hitler's National Socialism in particular. This position he abandoned when World War II broke out. After a stint in the U.S. Army, he returned to Harvard, where he had earlier taken his undergraduate education, and began the study of architecture. Upon graduation he opened his own office, and in 1946 resumed his former curatorial post at MOMA.

In 1947 he staged another epochal exhibition, a retrospective of the modern master he most revered, Mies van der Rohe, publishing a catalogue that for decades was the principal scholarly source of information on the subject. It was only then, after accumulating a substantial record as curator and writer, that Johnson began his career as an architect. Mies again figured in this; Johnson's first important building, the Glass House in New Canaan, Conn., a residence he designed for himself, was by his own admission based on the Farnsworth House, one of Mies's most illustrious works. The die was cast. For the remainder of Johnson's career he was an adapter, not an inventor, promoting styles invariably traceable to other, more original figures.

To be sure, he was responsible for some genuinely memorable architecture. The Glass House, by consensus one of his finest efforts, was evidence that he had learned his Miesian lesson very well. In 1953 he designed a sculpture garden that handsomely justified the commission by MOMA, then almost literally his home. The 1963 Pre-Columbian Museum at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C., is a masterpiece of elegant materials exquisitely illuminated. And in 1980 in Garden Grove, Calif., he completed the Crystal Cathedral, a church supported on a space frame, with 10,000 glass panes and a monumental interior that seats almost 3,000 parishioners.

Yet none of these successes was followed by the kind of serious probing that might have led to the production of something deeper, something better. Johnson was described at times as suffering from the architectural equivalent of attention deficit disorder. Thus it seemed fully in character when he picked up the scent of postmodernism in the 1970s. "You cannot not know history" became his mantra, a justification of such mid-'80s historicist efforts as the Pittsburgh Plate Glass corporate headquarters building in Pittsburgh, a glassy replication of London's Houses of Parliament, and more famously, the AT&T (now Sony) Tower in New York with its Chippendale crown that earned him a place on the cover of Time magazine, where he was shown holding a model of the building as if he were Moses and it the tablet of the commandments.

By then his various accomplishments had, with the help of the press, made him the dean of a movement he had followed rather than begun. But however unoriginal as a designer, he possessed a combination of wealth, shrewdness and generosity that enabled him to become one of the 20th century's leading patrons of the arts. Collecting works by artists like Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, Frank Stella and Robert Rauschenberg, he filled a pair of galleries of his own design--one for painting, one for sculpture--on his New Canaan property, and bequeathed the whole to the National Trust. Of more relevance to his profession, he had the eye and, above all, the power to draw the world's attention to younger architects whose work he liked, thus helping to vault at least two of them--Frank Gehry and Peter Eisenman--into international prominence.

It is difficult to avoid the judgment that as an architect Johnson was a satellite rather than a star, less deserving of centrality than most of his obituaries have suggested. As a curator, critic, historian and patron, however, he was a genuine innovator, deserving of history's deepest respect.

COPYRIGHT 2005 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2005 Gale Group