This country’s deeply ingrained white supremacy and the resurgence of fascism have revealed themselves, last night, to be undeniably mutually reinforcing. When this antidemocratic and racist president was first elected I wrote here about The White Flight from American Democracy. I could not have imagined it would go so far as a mob storming the Capitol with matching red hats and corporate logos for flags. In the first few weeks of the administration, I outlined some of the ways that our field has been complicit in the rise of autocracy both here and around the world.
In this moment I want to share with you a close read of one institution. In this one institution-- even largely the work of one person in that institution–fascism, Nazism, and white supremacy present themselves tightly wound together at the core of a body of work and influence that stretches across decades. This may seem myopic in such a moment of bizarre crises. But I think we have had enough of the vague platitudes and statements that address racism as if it were ether dispersed in geological time. I would also invite all of us to stop pretending the problem is out there and not in here.
In 2017 I wrote - Our discipline is not innocent. We watched, over the past few decades, the discipline of architecture veer off into luxury formalism for autocrats and dictators. We watched our most experimental ambitions align themselves with oligarchy. And here in the US, at home, we allowed a neo-traditionalism to fester and professionalize itself.
At the time I was excoriated in the comments for the accusation about neo-traditionalism. Now I realize the problem is much deeper than I thought then. I realize this after dedicating much of the fall and winter to researching a fascist organizer who managed to penetrate the core of this country’s premier institutions of architecture and design–from the Museum of Modern Art to Harvard Graduate School of Design to the Pritzker Prize. That fascist organizer and white supremacist is, of course, Philip Johnson.
The head curatorship of MoMA’s Architecture and Design department is also named after this fascist-white supremacist. For decades, even as concerns about Johnson’s legacy have been circulating, the overwhelmingly white architecture world has failed to connect the dots between Johnson’s Nazi affiliations; his passionate racism; and the de facto Whites Only policy of the Department of Architecture and Design at MoMA. Black architects (like myself) were effectively banned from exhibition at MoMA for decades. The collection of tens of thousands of works did not include more than one sketch by a Black designer until last year.
Black architects (like myself) were effectively banned from exhibition at MoMA for decades. The collection of tens of thousands of works did not include more than one sketch by a Black designer until last year
The museum has repeatedly denied calls from trustees, architects, students of architecture, and educators to rescue their collection and exhibitions from the reach of Johnson’s legacy of fascism, Nazism, and white supremacy. These political systems are not synonymous with each other. Johnson managed a deep and long-term commitment to all three paradigms, devoting his own money to these causes and tying these passions to his professional work.
Johnson directly funded and supported fascist political figures in the US, namely Lawrence Dennis and Huey Long, touring from Ohio to Louisiana. For this work he used his physical office at MoMA to review weapons catalogs and host meetings. After his international style exhibition in 1932, Johnson left MoMA to co-found an offshoot political fascist party, called the Grey Shirts. Grey Shirts worked for anti-democratic Louisiana Governor Huey Long and supported Charles Coughlin in Michigan, one of the pioneers of anti-semitic and white supremacist talk radio. In Johnson’s youth, he also funded violent groups such as Christian Mobilizers and Christian Front. In his last decades, he designed buildings for Donald Trump, including an unbuilt castle that featured an alligator-filled moat. (This, of course, re-appeared decades later as a potential for the border with Mexico). For decades, Johnson predicted — and worked toward — the rise of a white American fascist political movement.
In his last decades, he designed buildings for Donald Trump, including an unbuilt castle that featured an alligator-filled moat
A fluent speaker of Dutch and German, Johnson traveled to Germany in the 1930s specifically to meet with Nazi officials. He traveled with the Nazi army into Poland; attended a Nazi training camp and multiple Hitler rallies. He used his MoMA office and curatorial practice as a pretense for travel visas. He coordinated with the Nazi Party from New York City, including translating and publishing Nazi propaganda into English, all of which was deemed enough activity to fill a WWII FBI file (Source: Cleveland, V.W. Memorandum to Mr. Evans, Philip Johnson Special Inquiry, The White House, April 11, 1963). As Isabelle Wilkerson notes in Caste (Chapter 8), the Third Reich extensively studied American laws and eugenics theories: Johnson’s Nazi activities can be understood as part of a larger exchange of racist ideas and practices.
Under Johnson’s leadership, MoMA was not a neutral bystander that happened to exclude Black architects. From the very first days of the Architecture and Design Department in 1932, MoMA was heavily involved with housing policies and selections of architects for urban renewal projects across the country. The architecture collection, under five decades of Johnson’s control, did not collect a single work from a Black architect -- not even a drawing (Among others: Blackness at MoMA, 2019, “White by Design” chapter by Mabel Wilson). Indeed, Johnson openly belittled Black architects.
Prior to the 1970s, the only exhibition that even featured a Black architect at MoMA was curated in Johnson’s absence. As late as his 90th birthday, Philip Johnson laced racial theories into his interviews on architecture (Source: Charlie Rose show Monday 07/08/1996). Johnson allied himself so thoroughly with racial segregation in the South, that he discussed preferences for designing segregated buildings as late as 1973 and often referred to himself as Southern, even though he was born and raised in Ohio.
To those who associate MoMA with modern and contemporary art, its history and ongoing denials of the museum’s continued veneration of Johnson may sound shocking. It may also appear irrelevant at a time when architecture needs to grapple with transitioning to a non-extractive economy and reinventing itself for a more egalitarian society. It is not irrelevant. Institutions that support architecture and design in this country are so overwhelmingly complicit with antiblack racism and antidemocratic politics that the legacy of Johnson continues to circulate as an exemplar of architectural leadership. As urgent as this is to address, it indicates deeper national questions. Where can the public access the archives of the Black architects who defined eras of environmental transformation and urban imagination in the 20th century: everything from the New Deal to the Harlem Renaissance; the 1960s Civil Rights to the rise of Black mayors in the 1980s? How do we negotiate public resources allocated to institutions that remain Eurocentric and even white supremacist, to the point of excluding Black curators and staff? How do we reckon with pivotal figures who offer us a lens into the mechanisms of white supremacy in this country, not only from the plantation era, but as recently as a few decades ago? What does it mean for an institution's antiracist goals when a job title is named after a Nazi collaborator?
Where can the public access the archives of the Black architects who defined eras of environmental transformation and urban imagination in the 20th century: everything from the New Deal to the Harlem Renaissance; the 1960s Civil Rights to the rise of Black mayors in the 1980s?
The architecture field in the United States is facing a reckoning which has been delayed for decades, arguably since the days of the Public Works Association in the 1930s. Those early days of the New Deal were the last time that national architectural organizations attempted to address Black America seriously — either as architects or as communities in need of housing and civic architecture like any other in the world. Last year, prompted by the Movement for Black Lives, a plethora of architectural organizations made public statements about the significance of Black people and the need to tackle racism ‘in the field’. Significantly, however, most viewed it as a challenge that would take a lifetime, if not more, putting forward nebulous, vague goals. Yet there are some steps that should be obvious and immediate.
The legacy of Philip Johnson reveals the ways that a certain architecture and planning status quo is built upon anti-Black racism and anti-democratic politics. MoMA owes the people of this country an apology for serving as an institutional enabler of fascism and white supremacist work throughout the last century. Let removing Johnson’s name be the beginning of a much deeper reckoning for that one institution and a small step for the field of architecture toward unequivocally embracing both democracy and Black existence.
V. Mitch McEwen is Director of Princeton's Black Box Research Group and Principal of Atelier Office. McEwen's design work has been awarded grants from the Graham Foundation, Knight Foundation, and New York State Council on the Arts. McEwen's projects have been commissioned by the ...
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Here, Here!
Johnson’s other beliefs—the superiority of the rich over the poor, for example—he continued to promote. Returning to MoMA in the nineteen-fifties, he helped remove the previous architecture curator, Elizabeth Mock, whom he despised because of her interest “in housing and in doing good, which interested me not at all,” he would recall. Partnering with Mies van der Rohe on the Seagram Building, he designed for himself the whiskey-dark skyscraper’s most spectacle-rich space, the Four Seasons Restaurant (now, sadly, gutted). In keeping with Johnston's politics, it was the most expensive restaurant in the history of the city, where the “power lunch” was invented, and where Johnson himself came to hold regular court, helping to dispense commissions to some of the most hallowed names in late-twentieth and early-twenty-first-century architecture: Richard Rogers, Michael Graves, Frank Gehry.
Beyond the overt racism and antisemitism, we also ought to grapple with western architecture's tacit complicity in class stratification - from the structure of "the profession" as a whole, to the hiring practices of offices, to the types of projects that are the result of all of the above.
But yes, time's up for 'apolitical' veneration of these types of figures. I am capable of separating the work from the artist's persona, to an extent (and so are lots of people), but we can't pretend they're separate when the work is a vehicle for a personal agenda, especially when such an agenda is blatantly elitist, anti-human, and vile.
Russian Constructivism was omitted from Johnson's "Modern Architecture: International Style" exhibit - a very notable exclusion, no doubt motivated by his ideology.
not sure why the link was removed from my quote... Here it is, the 2018 New Yorker article by Nikil Saval from which I quoted the first paragraph: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/dept-of-design/philip-johnson-the-man-who-made-architecture-amoral
Certainly, he was raised in a privileged status, it must be noted for reminder sake, not all white people are from privileged households which inherently is about wealth status. Some of the overarching issue is wealth status. Wealth status tends to extract some level of privileged treatment. Anyway, carry on. It is so it is not unspoken and unheard because the social issue isn't strictly about race but wealth status and other issues. I think Architecture design values are substantively independent of racial issues. However, I do think real estate development practices had been deeply involved with racial mistreatment and that some architects had been complicit. However, I do not believe values of 'form following function' has anything to do with race, "whiteness" or "white supremacy" even though some individual architects were. Just as there had been architects who were sexist and even sex abusers yet their designs don't indicate anything about their views on women. There is cognitive compartmentalization to keep in mind. (a psychological phenomenon)
Dude was a straight up white supremacist. Doesn't mean a thing about the architecture he peddled.
Agree. It was a cheap and superficial ripoff of more innovative thinker's work through and through, regardless of ideology.
but it does mean some things about his architecture, you see! He designed an opulent restaurant in the Seagram to keep the rabble and the gentlemen separate, as an unofficial throne room, in which he would ultimately gain authority. He specifically demoted modern European architects' concern with affordable mass housing, and other socially-driven ideological aspects of the movement, even as he promoted "the style". He omitted any references or acknowledgements to the disciplinary contributions from entire geo-political regions, because he didn't want his architecture -and thereby an extension of his persona - to be in any way linked with those societies.
European modernism isn't 'his' architecture though. He promoted it because it was the hot new thing and as a person of privilege, he could buy his way into high culture, but his faults don't corrupt modernism any more than other people's corrupt classicism. History is littered with those who've used architecture as a proxy for their own agenda. That doesn't mean they get to define it forever. That said, it's past due cultural institutions like MOMA disassociate themselves from the likes of Philip Johnson.
This all being 20/20 yes, but imagine if we'd actually stopped, took a measure of courage, and actually questioned at the time he was doing the work; hey, you supported Nazis, how can we trust the who and what you are building now? Why isn't that an extension of your cultural, and racist thinking? How can we, or should we believe you?
cognitive compartmentalization. How he designed and architectural design values are cognitively compartmentalized to such a degree that his values regarding architectural composition and spatial/form/function relationships are cognitively isolated from his personal views regarding races at least to a substantive level.
You can make an argument about his complicity with racial segregation and the development practices of his client and their agenda. You can argue against his professional practice and issues relating to racism but when it comes to architectural composition, it is not likely that you'll get a clear-cut link to racism. The buildings are designed to meet a client's 'architectural program' and the building's functional requirements. In those days, the common racist (but also discrimination based on wealth status) practice was through gentrification and occasional eminent domain practices that developers utilized governments to push out population groups.
Johnson's persona and beliefs have only recently been discovered by many casual and not so casual followers of architecture. We do have to ask why this knowledge has been so long in coming. We didn't see it in the histories. It certainly can't be ignored or glossed over now. Much more needs to come to light, and corrections need to be made.
But the relationship between architecture and politics has always been complex and problematic. Le Corbusier, for example, did make a commitment to public housing, with highly disturbing vision. Other modernists took on housing in the housing crisis after WWI.
Politics of whatever stripe, however, has proven itself to be blind, if not destructive, of esthetic and social ends.
I gave it a shot. Giuseppe Terragni's Casa:
https://returningcenter.wordpr...
And Ilya Golosov, Zuev Workers’ Club, Moscow:
https://returningcenter.wordpr...
This has occupied me for the past weeks, along with the election. I don't pretend to have clear answers. I am quite fond, however, of both buildings and think we can learn from them.
Tthis is a very challenging topic and this article is so very well written. Very nicely done.
On the face of it simply repudiate Johnson and everything he did. Not having people of color represented at MOMA is insane, unjustifiable, and stupid. It weakens the institution to have that kind of policy.
On the other hand I admire Johnson's glass house quite a lot and find myself saddened to need to place it with the Cosby show in the pile of cultural products that need to be erased from our life because the artist responsible for it was so heinous. But yeah, it must be done. Now I wonder what to do with my own projects that reference his work. Is it enough to simply remove his name from the work, like Harvard did with this house? Seems superficial, but then again erasing history only causes us to relive it.
Funny thing is I recently listened to the new biography of Johnson and it is pretty clear about his fascist activism in his youth and some parts of his racism, but as far as I recall it did not make clear the fact that he used his position to keep people of color out of MOMA. Mostly his flaws are explained away by an untamed ego.
We need to be more explicit about what he did and why.
When it comes to fixing the stain that sits on our profession and our society as a whole, this is a meager and minimal start. I would add that issues like this should be taught in school, not only about the architecture, but the urban planning, the supply chains, and the logistics of our world that support racism and inequality at so many levels. It wont solve the problem but at least we will have no more excuses. Let us at the very least remove the excuse of plausible deniability.
Was the book Lamster's The Man in the Glass House? Do you (anyone) recommend it?
yes that is the one. I'll have to go through it again to answer properly, but i thought it was a relatively clear narrative without judgement of the person except perhaps to admire his ego a bit much. It does make clear how Johnson was able to create his position in architecture and I found that interesting. The recent Bio about Gehry is what inspired me to pick it up, because that one suggests Johnson was instrumental in his career and I wanted to understand how he got to be that guy. On that point it is a good read. Not too academic, etc. But if you want a more honest analysis of the harm he did I dont think it is a great source. It is talked about here and there and with a few specific people, but without the full context and eliding some details. The book does cover his fascist journey and explains how he more or less wiggled out of taking responsibility for it at the end. However, I dont recall reading about the crazy policy to keep out everyone but the Whites from MOMA. To be fair, it may be I simply missed it and it actually is in there...It is a good bio in that Johnson is not treated anything like a cartoon and you get a sense of him as a full human being, so I might have missed it in the push and pull of the description of his life...
Thanks for the comments. One footnote - Johnson did make an exception for Japanese architects, at the time that Japan and Germany were allied (or, more specifically, axis-ed) in WWII. For a discussion of how Johnson excluded South American architects you can see Barry Bergdoll's statements when he first stepped into the chief curator role. But, yes, basically Johnson was so successful in excluding Black architects from the MoMA circle that no one has even bothered to note the exclusion until last year. Privately the Director of MoMA has even recently said, "MoMA did not create the problem," as if any curator of architecture would have been a white supremacist banning Black architects, or as if Black architects didn't exist until.... the 1990s?
Julian F. Abele
Paul Williams
Max Bond
Hilyard Robinson
Norma Merrick Sklarek
Jack Travis
..and this entire book https://stoutbooks.com/product...
...and this one https://www.amazon.com/Black-B...
This was news to me, and it's enlightening. Thank you, Mitch!
1000 words
Mitch McEwen,
I concur with Will Galloway in that its a challenging topic that is complex and involves socio-economic status, racial-bias/systemic racism, and many other contributing issues which I think is really hard to fully understand without the whole web of context of the times.
For a relatively brief article, you did a fairly reasonable job at it. A person can practically write volumes of books and still only cover just the tip of the ice berg on a really complicated and problematic social-cultural-status/etc. issue.
January 6th event shows we still have A LOT of work ahead and more troubling times ahead (to very very lightly paraphase what MLK, jr. said.
Architects for the elite debating architecture for the elite. This has precious little to do with the vast majority of firms.
This is all beginning to make sense. I am humbled and embarrassed for learning this history, at this late date. But I can see how it has created this culture of exclusion.
My past 40 years of architecture has been a history of brutalization, intimidation, and bullying by a (majority) of my past associates, government agencies, (and principals).
I have been accused... and even fired(once) for stealing. (The owner was too embarrassed to re-hire me when the wallet was discovered hidden in the office drawer of the principal/accuser). (Note: He was not fired for making a false statement)
Associates would vandalize my work.( To the point where I had to keep backup files)
Even racial harassment: My first office(1973), My first name started with an "N".
I have worked with some large firms like AECOM, Perkins+Will, Gensler, and others. But It has been no different.
How many of you do "allNighters"? I have been detained (44 times) and/or removed from various business and construction sites, because it was viewed that I did not belong.
On my first day in 1988, The receptionist called police for my trespassing.
And in 2018, I was contacted by my intern, stating that someone had "expectorated" into the earpiece of her phone. When I complained, we were both layed-off. It was one of the Principals, I found from another female architect.
In "94, I completed my NCARB. But the review board would not allow my license, claiming, once, that "they had met their quota for minority architects". This was not true, of course. The following year, three different reviewers referred to me as "You People" 17 times. ( I recorded it). The excuse was different each year. Note: In 2004, A "group of candidates" sued the state. They eliminated the review board for "not matching the needs of the community" and intimidation of women and "certain classes")
Last year, I started my own company to serve those who are "less attractive" to other architects; for those who don't care what I look like. I completed 4 projects alone, last year. This year, I have 14 projects backlogged. And I will need to hire a few brilliant designers. (And...I don't care what they look like)
I have been very resilient over my career. But others have been pushed away. But not just architecture. We have ignored the contributions possible in construction, engineering, and fabrication
...with sincere passion and love for architecture.
In the words of Neil Young, "Don't Be Denied"
Aside: I am noticing that all of my intimidators have been men? Interesting.
"Even racial harassment: My first office(1973), My first name started with an "N".
I don't believe this for a moment.
Interesting. Have you ever lived in Louisville, Kentucky in 1973? I haven't even describe the tasteless jokes that I endured for 3 years...
This is my truth. I'm sorry... no I'm glad that you never had to experience it
It would seem that there would be readers of this blog that worked in offices where similar incidents occurred involving their minority coworkers even if not directed to themselves. Anyone?
I started architecture as a draftsman when I was 17, I finished school. And I joined the Air Force and landed in California, in 1980. I naively, thought it would be better. Rather than the use of harmful language, some terms were reduced to keywords like, "That Boy". In the 90's, (Rodney King era), negative actions were performed instead of negative words. (Harassment, Bullying, Sabotage, etc). And then the quiet indignation (or respect), ruled the 2000. And "No. I can't play basketball". So now there is an awakening. Everyone wants to speak out. Well...Speak!
(let me start off)
1. Worse Record: Stopped 33(DWB), Detained 8 times, and Arrested 1 time (First day conflict with Receptionist 1988) (1980-2010) Newport Beach, Ca.
2. Worse Incident: 2018, my summer intern reported to me that someone "expectorated" into her phone earpiece. She was horrified. And so was I, when it was "rumored" to be a principal. When I reported it to HR. We were both laid off.
Office politics? or Office harassment?
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