When Philip Johnson passed away in 2005 at the age of 98, he had done it all in the world of architecture. Widely referred to as the dean of American architecture, Johnson pretty much lived a fantasy life from day one. Born into a wealthy family and schooled at Harvard, Johnson traveled extensively in Europe, built a house for himself while in architecture school, and started off his career working with his mentor, Mies van der Rohe on one of the most lavishly funded commissions in Manhattan.
By the end of his life, the architect had completed dozens of major commissions, including several here in Boston, won the prestigious Pritzker prize in architecture and lived on a 40+-acre estate with his partner in New Canaan, Connecticut. He even managed to come out, in his late 60s, although he had to be egged on by no less than Barbara Walters to make his relationship with David Whitney more public under the “times have changed” rhetoric.
Johnson’s Boston work, namely the 1972 Boston Public Library addition, 1992’s International Place in the financial district and 500 Boylston, constructed in 1989 in Back Bay, represent the very beginning, middle and end of Johnson’s foray into the post-modern. But to get a good feel for Johnson’s life work, you really have to start by visiting the recently opened Glass House in New Canaan. On this property you’ll travel inside Johnson’s mind, seeing ideas spanning over half a century turned into form. But visit philipjohnsonglasshouse.org first, because to visit this National Trust property you will need tickets.
At an early age, Johnson became a huge promoter of the German Bauhaus, helping to bring architects Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius from Germany to the United States at the onset of WWII. Johnson’s Ash Street House in Cambridge, really a fanciful school project while he was enrolled in Harvard’s architecture program in the 1940s, shows his love of modernism. A few years later, the unornamented lines of International Style modernism in Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram’s Building in New York City – in which Johnson played a supporting design role – would prove an auspicious start to a wildly active career; one that would take him from the Bauhaus through the post-modern to the expressionist, sculptural works of his later years.
In 1979, Johnson told a group in California that architects like himself were actually “very high-class whores who believe in doing what the society of our times tells us to do.” Always adept at creating a stir with his words, his designs did indeed often reflect the ideals of his clients and the era. Just as the pure classicism of his New York State Theater at Lincoln Center pointed to the learned optimism of the late 50s early 60s, the gilded historicism of the 56-story, pink granite RepublicBank in Houston or the gold-leafed lobbies at 500 Boylston in Boston, both held a mirror up to the drenched-in-dollars Reagan years.
Johnson was never one to be held back, and his work, on occasion careened, tongue-in-cheek, toward the outrageous. The village of gothic, glass-sheathed towers for PPG Place in Pittsburg is one example. The leaning twin towers of the Puerta de Europa in Madrid are another, created like many of the buildings mentioned here, in a partnership with fellow architect John Burgee.
The last years of Johnson’s life were devoted to a more sculptural, sensuous architecture and art, one that was in love with the work of architect Frank Gehry as well as that of artist Frank Stella. A fabulous public art piece of Johnson’s is still on display for the lucky traveler to Vienna, Austria. The Weiner Trio is a tripartite sculpture exploring monumentality. In it are expressionistic similarities to Johnson’s Da Monsta, a visitor’s center he constructed, coming full circle; you guessed it, at the Glass House.
In the end, this new work of Johnson’s seemed a good fit. The architect had learned his lesson with post-modern buildings like the highly decorative AT&T in New York or 500 Boylston in Boston. As he told author Hilary Lewis and me in the early 90’s, “You can copy the Parthenon… but I’m sorry, it ain’t there. A copy just doesn’t do it.”
John T. O’Connor
About the Author:
John O’Connor received his Master’s degree from Harvard University Graduate School of Design. He is co-author of Philip Johnson: The Architect in His Own Words and Unseen Warhol, both published by Rizzoli Intl. He co-founded HOME Miami and HOME Fort Lauderdale magazines to which he still contributes.
