Philip Johnson

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Philip Johnson
Born July 8, 1906;
Died January 25, 2005;
Notes
At Great Buildings http://www.GreatBuildings.com/architects/Philip_Johnson.html

Contents



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Works

  • Philip Johnson House, at Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1942 to 1943.   Archiplanet page
  • Johnson House, "The Glass House", at New Caanan, Connecticut, 1949.   Archiplanet page   GreatBuildings page
  • John de Menil House, at Houston, Texas, 1950.   Archiplanet page
  • Mrs. John D. Rockefeller III Guest House, at New York, New York, 1950.   Archiplanet page
  • Hodgson House, at New Canaan, Connecticut, 1951.  (with Landis Gores)   Archiplanet page
  • Oneto House, at Irvington, New York, 1951.  (with Landis Gores)   Archiplanet page
  • Ball House, at New Canaan, Connecticut, 1953.
  • Wiley House, at New Canaan, Connecticut, 1953.
  • Boissonas House, at New Canaan, Connecticut, 1956.
  • Nuclear Reactor, at Rehovot, Israel, 1960 to 1964.   Archiplanet page
  • Amon Carter Museum of Western Art, at Fort Worth, Texas, 1961.   Archiplanet page
  • Museum for Pre-Columbian Art, Dumbarton Oaks, at Washington, D.C., 1963.   Archiplanet page
  • Kline Geology Laboratory, at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, 1965.  (with Richard Foster)   Archiplanet page
  • New York State Theater, Lincoln Center, at New York, New York, 1964.  (with Richard Foster)   Archiplanet page
  • Epidemiology and Public Healh Building, at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, 1965.   Archiplanet page
  • Kline Science Center, at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, 1965.  (with Richard Foster)   Archiplanet page
  • Henry L. Moses Institute, Montefiore Hospital, at Bronx, New York, 1965.   Archiplanet page
  • Bielefeld Art Gallery, at Bielefeld, Germany, 1968.   Archiplanet page
  • John F. Kennedy Memorial, at Dallas, Texas, 1970.   Archiplanet page
  • Philip Johnson Sculpture Gallery, at New Canaan, Connecticut, 1970.   Archiplanet page
  • Albert and Vera List Art Building, at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, 1972.   Archiplanet page
  • Tisch Hall, at New York University, New York, New York, 1972.  (with Richard Foster)   Archiplanet page
  • Andre and Bella Meyer Hall of Physics (facade), at New York University, New York, 1972.  (with Richard Foster)   Archiplanet page
  • Pennzoil Place, at Houston, Texas, 1976.  (Johnson-Burgee)   Archiplanet page   GreatBuildings page
  • Garden Grove Church (the Crystal Cathedral), at Garden Grove, Los Angeles, California, 1978 to 1980.  (Johnson-Burgee)   Archiplanet page   GreatBuildings page
  • AT&T Building (now Sony), at New York, New York, 1980 to 1984.  (Johnson-Burgee)   Archiplanet page
  • Museum of Television and Radio, at West 52nd Street, New York, New York.   Archiplanet page
  • 1 Central Park West, New York, New York.  (with Alan Richie)   Archiplanet page
  • <a href="/architects/Johnson-Burgee.html">see also Johnson-Burgee</a>   Archiplanet page
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Discussion

(b. Cleveland, Ohio, July 8, 1906; d. New Canaan, Connecticut, January 25, 2005)

Philip Johnson was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1906. He received an A. B. in architectural history from Harvard University in 1930 and upon graduation became the Director of the Department of Architecture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

In 1932 he co-directed the Modern Architecture exhibition at MOMA which introduced European modern architecture to a wide American audience. Building on the MOMA show, Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock codified the principles of modern architecture in the book The International Style: Architecture since 1922 . During the 1930s, Johnson used his personal wealth to champion the cause of many modern architects most notably Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.

In 1940 Johnson returned to Harvard's Graduate School of Design where he trained under MOMA in 1958, received the AIA Gold Medal in 1978, and received the Pritzker Architecture prize in 1979.

As an architect, Johnson is most widely respected for his work in the early 1950s while still under the influence of anti-Post Modernist at will. This has led to the criticism that he showed more interest in style than in substance. He will probably be remembered more as a stimulator of ideas than as a designer.

References
Dennis Sharp. The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Architects and Architecture. New York: Quatro Publishing, 1991. ISBN 0-8230-2539-X. NA40.I45. p83-84.

"Toward the end of his life, Johnson went public with some private matters -- his homosexuality and his past as a disciple of Hitler-style fascism. On the latter, he said he spent much time in Berlin in the 1930s and became "fascinated with power," but added he did not consider that an excuse.

""I have no excuse (for) such utter, unbelievable stupidity. ... I don't know how you expiate guilt," he says.

"He blamed his homosexuality for causing a nervous breakdown while he was a student at Harvard and said that in 1977 he asked the New Yorker magazine to omit references to it in a profile, fearing he might lose the AT&T commission, which he called "the job of my life."

"In the 1950s, Johnson reflected on his career and what he hoped to achieve.

""I like the thought that what we are to do on this earth is embellish it for its greater beauty," he said, "so that oncoming generations can look back to the shapes we leave here and get the same thrill that I get in looking back at theirs -- at Chartres Cathedral.""

— "Celebrated architect Philip Johnson dies at 98", Associated Press story at CNN, 2005.0126

"In the late 1950's, just after he had collaborated with Seagram Building on Park Avenue, he introduced elements of classical architecture into his buildings, beginning a long quest to find ways of connecting contemporary architecture to historical form. It was a quest that would begin with highly abstracted versions of Classicism in the 1960's and culminate in a much more literal use of the architectural forms of the past in his revivalist skyscrapers of the 1980's.

"That phase of Mr. Johnson's career included such well-known monuments as the classically detailed pink-granite AT&T Building (now the Sony building) on Madison Avenue, which he completed in 1984 with John Burgee, then his partner; the Republic Bank tower (now NCNB Center) in Houston, which used elements of Flemish Renaissance architecture; the Transco Tower (now the Williams Tower) in Houston, which recapitulated the setback forms of a romantic 1920's tower in glass, perhaps his finest skyscraper; and the PPG Place in Pittsburgh, a reflective glass tower whose Gothic form copied the shape of the tower of the Houses of Parliament in London. ...

"Mr. Johnson, an urbane, elegant figure, was perhaps the most socially prominent New York architect since Museum of Modern Art and always on weekends in the famous Glass House compound.

"Mr. Johnson had lunch daily amid other prominent and powerful New Yorkers at a special table in the corner of the Grill Room of the Four Seasons. His guest was likely to be a young architect in whose work he had taken an interest, and for years his table functioned as a kind of miniature architectural salon."

— Paul Goldberger, "Philip Johnson Is Dead at 98; Architecture's Restless Intellect", New York Times, 2005.0127.

The Creator's Words

"Merely that a building works is not sufficient." - 1954

"I would rather sleep in Chartres Cathedral with the nearest toilet two blocks away than in a Harvard house with back-to-back bathrooms."

"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. ...

"Monuments differ in different periods. Each age has its own. ...

"Maybe, just maybe, we shall at last come to care for the most important, most challenging, surely the most satisfying of all architectural creations: building cities for people to live in."

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Details

  • Philip Cortelyou Johnson, son of Homer H. Johnson, a wealthy lawyer, and Louise Pope Johnson
  • Fellow, American Institute of Architects, 1963
    AIA Gold Medal, 1978
  • Recipient, Pritzker Architecture Prize, 1979.


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Related Content from Wikipedia

Philip Johnson

Philip Cortelyou Johnson ( July 8, 1906– January 25, 2005) was an influential American architect. With his thick, round-framed glasses, Johnson was the most recognizable figure in American architecture for decades.

In 1930, he founded the Department of Architecture and Design at MoMA and later (1978), as a trustee, he was awarded an American Institute of Architects Gold Medal and the first Pritzker Architecture Prize, in 1979. He was a student at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. When Johnson died in January 2005, he was survived by his long time life partner David Whitney, who died only a few months later, on June 12, 2005.

Early life

Johnson was born in Cleveland, Ohio. He was descended from the Jansen (a.k.a. Johnson) family of New Amsterdam, and included among his ancestors the Huguenot Jacques Cortelyou who laid out the first town plan of New Amsterdam for Peter Stuyvesant. He attended the Hackley School, in Tarrytown, New York, and then studied at Harvard as an undergraduate, where he focused on history and philosophy, particularly the work of the Pre-Socratic philosophers. Johnson interrupted his education with several extended trips to Europe. These trips became the pivotal moment of his education; he visited Chartres, the Parthenon, and many other ancient monuments, becoming increasingly fascinated with architecture. [1]

Then in 1928 Johnson met the Bauhaus architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who was at the time designing the German Pavilion for the Barcelona exhibition of 1929. The meeting was a revelation for Johnson and formed the basis for a lifelong relationship of both collaboration and competition.

Johnson returned from Germany as a proselytizer for the new architecture. Touring Europe more comprehensively with his friends Alfred H. Barr, Jr. and Henry-Russell Hitchcock to examine firsthand recent trends in architecture, the three assembled their discoveries as the landmark show "The International Style: Architecture Since 1922" at the Museum of Modern Art, in 1932. The show was profoundly influential and is seen as the introduction of modern architecture to the American public. It introduced such pivotal architects as Le Corbusier, Gropius, and Mies van der Rohe. The exhibition was also notable for a controversy: architect Frank Lloyd Wright withdrew his entries in pique that he was not more prominently featured.

As critic Peter Blake has stated, the importance of this show in shaping American architecture in the century "cannot be overstated." In the book accompanying the show, coauthored with Hitchcock, Johnson argued that the new modern style maintained three formal principles: 1. an emphasis on architectural volume over mass (planes rather than solidity) 2. a rejection of symmetry and 3. rejection of applied decoration. The definition of the movement as a "style" with distinct formal characteristics has been seen by some critics as downplaying the social and political bent that many of the European practitioners shared.

Johnson continued to work as a proponent of modern architecture, using the Museum of Modern Art as a bully pulpit. He arranged for Le Corbusier's first visit to the United States in 1935, then worked to bring Mies and Marcel Breuer to the US as emigres.

In the 1930s Johnson sympathized with Nazism, and expressed antisemitic ideas [2] [3]. Regarding this period in his life, he later said, "I have no excuse (for) such unbelievable stupidity... I don't know how you expiate guilt."

During the Great Depression, Johnson resigned his post at MoMA to try his hand at journalism and agrarian populist politics. His enthusiasm centered on the critique of the liberal welfare state, whose "failure" seemed to be much in evidence during the 1930's. As a correspondent, Johnson observed the Nuremberg Rallies in Germany and covered the invasion of Poland in 1939. The invasion proved the breaking point in Johnson's interest in journalism or politics -- he returned to enlist in the US Army. After a couple of self-admittedly undistinguished years in uniform, Johnson returned to the Harvard Graduate School of Design to finally pursue his ultimate career of architect.

The Glass House

Johnson's early influence as a practicing architect was his use of glass; his masterpiece was a " Glass House" he designed as his own residence in New Canaan, Connecticut, a profoundly influential work (1949). The concept of a Glass House set in a landscape with views as its real “walls” had been developed by many authors in the German Glasarchitektur drawings of the 1920’s, and already sketched in initial form by Johnson's mentor Mies. The building is an essay in minimal structure, geometry, proportion, and the effects of transparency and reflection.

The house sits at the edge of a crest in 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.

Johnson continued to build structures on his estate as architectural essays. Offset fifty feet oblique to the Glass House there is a guest house, echoing the proportions of the Glass House and completely enclosed in brick (except for small round windows at the rear). It contains a bathroom, a library, and a single bedroom with a gilt vaulted ceiling and shag carpet. It was built at the same time as the guest house and can be seen as its formal counterpart. Johnson started that he deliberately designed it to be less than perfectly comfortable, as "guests are like fish, they should only last three days at most".

Later, Johnson added a painting gallery with an innovative viewing mechanism of rotating walls to hold paintings (influenced by the Hogarth displays at Sir John Soane's house), followed by a sky-lit sculpture gallery. The last structures Johnson built on the estate were a library and a reception building, the latter, red and black in color and of curving walls. Johnson viewed the ensemble of one-room buildings as a total work of art, claiming that it was his best and only "landscape project."

The Philip Johnson Glass House is a site of the National Trust for Historic Preservation and now open to the public for tours at www.philipjohnsonglasshouse.org.


The Seagram Building

After completing several houses in the idiom of Mies and Breuer, Johnson joined Mies van der Rohe as the New York associate architect for the 39-story Seagram Building (1956). Johnson was pivotal in steering the commission towards Mies, working with Phyllis Lambert, the daughter of the CEO of Seagram. This synergistic collaboration of architects and enlightened client resulted in the remarkable bronze-and-glass tower on Park Avenue, whose strength of proportion, elegance of material, and constructional rigor led The New York Times to judge it the most important building of the twentieth century.

Completing the Seagram Building with Mies also decisively marked a shift in Johnson's career. After this accomplishment, Johnson's practice enlarged as projects came in from the public realm -- such as coordinating the master plan of Lincoln Center and designing that complex's New York State Theater. Meanwhile, Johnson began to grow bored with the orthodoxies of the International Style he had championed.

Later Buildings

Although startling when constructed, the glass and steel tower (indeed many idioms of the modern movement) had by the 1960's become commonplace the world over. He eventually rejected much of the metallic appearance of earlier International Style buildings, and began designing spectacular, crystalline structures uniformly sheathed in glass. Many of these became instant icons, such as PPG Place in Pittsburgh and the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, California.

Johnson's architectural work is a balancing act between two dominant trends in post-war American art: the more "serious" movement of Minimalism, and the more populist movement of Pop art. His best work has aspects of both movements. Johnson's personal collections reflected this dichotomy, as he introduced artists such as Rothko to the Museum of Modern Art as well as Warhol. Straddling between these two camps, his work was seen by purists of either side as always too contaminated or influenced by the other.

From 1967 to 1991 Johnson collaborated with John Burgee. This was by far Johnson's most productive period certainly by the measure of scale -- he became known at this time as builder of iconic office towers, including Minneapolis's IDS Tower. That building's distinctive stepbacks (called "zogs" by the architect) created an appearance that has since become one of Minneapolis's trademarks and the crown jewel of its skyline.

The AT&T Building in Manhattan, now the Sony Building, was completed in 1984 and was immediately controversial for its neo-Georgian pediment (Chippendale top). At the time, it was seen as provocation on a grand scale: crowning a Manhattan skyscraper with a shape echoing a historical wardrobe top defied every precept of the modernist aesthetic: historical pattern had been effectively outlawed among architects for years. In retrospect other critics have seen the AT&T Building as the first Postmodernist statement, necessary in the context of modernism's aesthetic cul-de-sac.

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.

Notable Works

[[wikipedia:Image:New York State Theater atrium by David Shankbone.jpg|thumb||right|Atrium of the New York State Theater at Lincoln Center.]]

Quotes

  • "I would rather stay in Chartres Cathedral with the nearest toilet two blocks away, than in a Harvard house with back-to-back bathrooms."
  • "Architecture is surely not the design of space, certainly not the massing or organization of volumes. These are ancillary to the main point, which is the organization of procession. Architecture exists in time."
  • "The job of the architect today is to create beautiful buildings. That's all." 1965.
  • On architects being known for long life spans: "Of course they live long -- they have a chance to act out all their aggressions."
  • "To be in the presence of a great work of architecture is such a satisfaction that you can go hungry for days. To create a feeling such as mine in Chartres Cathedral when I was 13 is the aim of architecture."
  • "Early unsuccessess shouldn't bother anybody because it happens to absolutely everybody."

Johnson wrote (Heyer, 1966):

The painters have every advantage over us today...Besides being able to tear up their failures—we never can seem to grow ivy fast enough—their materials cost them nothing. They have no committees of laymen telling them what to do. They have no deadlines, no budgets. We are all sickeningly familiar with the final cuts to our plans at the last moment. Why not take out the landscaping, the retaining walls, the colonnades? The building would be just as useful and much cheaper. True, an architect leads a hard life—for an artist.
...Comfort is not a function of beauty... purpose is not necessary to make a building beautiful...sooner or later we will fit our buildings so that they can be used...where form comes from I don't know, but it has nothing at all to do with the functional or sociological aspects of our architecture.

References

External links

References/Further reading

Gallery

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Above content from Wikipedia available under GFDL retrieved Mon, 12 May 2008 09:23:44 -0700
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References

"Celebrated architect Philip Johnson dies at 98" Associated Press story at CNN, 2005.0126.

Paul Goldberger, "Philip Johnson Is Dead at 98; Architecture's Restless Intellect", New York Times, 2005.0127.

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External Links

Philip Johnson Pritzker Prize — Several pages of good background information, at the Pritzker Prize site.

Retrieved from "http://www.archiplanet.org/wiki/Philip_Johnson"
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