The Guardian's Andrew Saint writes a scorching, venomus obit to Philip Johnson. || related || via
Philip Johnson

Flamboyant postmodern architect whose career was marred by a flirtation with nazism

Andrew Saint
Saturday January 29, 2005
The Guardian

Philip Johnson, who has died aged 98, was for half a century the doyen of architectural opportunists. When modernist austerity was an aesthetic cause, he was in the vanguard. When the business of American architecture seemed to be business, he was its slickest salesman. Postmodernism was partly of his making. Then, when deconstruction hit New York, there was Johnson in his 80s in the thick of the theorists, networking, promoting favourites and talking, always talking.

If Johnson was always ahead of the architectural game, he never actually invented it. It has been said that he was the second to do everything. A second-class creative figure with a first-class brain and boundless wealth, charm and wit; in personality, he was half monster, half paragon of urbanity. An engagement with fascism in the 1930s never impeded his career. Antisemitic, anti-black, no respecter of women or children, he had many Jewish colleagues and clients, at least one black lover, and numerous women friends who received presents when their children or grandchildren were born. Flamboyantly gay, he admitted to four "Mrs Johnsons", of whom the last, David Whitney, was his companion for over 40 years.

If an unquenchable zest for life made others fascinating to him, ultimately he was heartless. By far his best work was for himself: the famous Glass House at New Canaan, Connecticut, where he died. It and its art collection will now become a museum.

Johnson came from a rich Wasp family from Cleveland, where his father was an attorney. Further money came from his mother's side. One of four children, Philip shone at school and, in 1923, was admitted to Harvard without an exam. The next year his father handed down a high proportion of his fortune. The girls got cash, while Johnson acquired Alcoa stock, the source of a lifelong self-indulgence. At first, life did not run smooth. Troubled by his sexuality, Philip took hunks of time out from Harvard and started travelling to Europe as a means of escape. He did not graduate until 1930.

Clever enough to toy with becoming a philosopher, but possessed of too short an attention span, Johnson drifted into modern art and architecture. In 1929, New York's Museum of Modern Art was in its infancy. Its director-designate, Alfred Barr, asked Johnson to seek out the best new German and Dutch architecture in Europe that summer. The first of Johnson's epiphanies, it went along with release from sexual inhibition in Berlin. There he learned German by "the horizontal method", he said. Puritan art and sybaritic behaviour seemed to go merrily together.

Next year Johnson returned to Germany with his architectural mentor, the historian and critic Henry-Russell Hitchcock. Against the European consensus, they agreed that what mattered most about the new architecture was art. Hitchcock had written an academic book to that effect, and the two tackled a popularising version, The International Style (1932), also the title of the first of many MoMA exhibitions that Johnson helped curate. In the kaleidoscope of Johnson's later career, its message was the one constant: architecture was about art and style. Forget function, ignore social responsibility - just make things as beautiful as you can and spend all the money you can get your hands on.

In 1934 Johnson broke his association with MoMA, retreating to Ohio for an ill-judged venture into politics. He had heard Hitler speak and was titillated by the aesthetics and sexuality of Nazism. The idea of a great leader who would save America from the Depression beckoned. Instead of Roosevelt, the supposed lackey of Jewish finance, Johnson and a friend, Alan Blackburn, fixed on Huey P Long, and then, when that odious Lousiana governor was assassinated, a demagogic priest from Michigan, Father Coughlin, as allies. Together they founded a new Union Party, grey-shirted and with the Johnson-designed symbol of a flying wedge as its swastika. Its trajectory was short and inglorious.

Worse followed. Johnson drifted back for his German summers in the late 1930s, attending one of the Nuremberg rallies. When war broke out he was there again, scribbling anti-British propaganda for Coughlin's journal. He was hard on the heels after the Panzer divisions into Poland. "The German green uniforms made the place look gay and happy," he reported. "There were not many Jews to be seen. We saw Warsaw burn and Modlin being burned. It was a stirring spectacle."

These fatuities had few long-term consequences for Johnson when he got back to America. Seventeen years later he was designing a synagogue for Port Chester, in no spirit of atonement, and was accepted everywhere in New York. When apologies came into fashion in the 1990s, Johnson issued one. But he experienced scant compunction.

In 1942, aged 36, Johnson elected to train as an architect, enrolling at Harvard's graduate school of design. In charge were the modernists Gropius and Breuer, but by now he was infatuated only with Mies van der Rohe, the most aesthetic of the German exiles, whom he had first met in Europe. Though a poor draughtsman, Johnson proved able to design well and quickly and could afford to build what he liked.

The first of his Miesian homages was a little town house near Harvard. After the war there followed Johnson's masterpiece, the Glass House, completed in 1949. Inspired by Mies's Farnsworth House but finished first, it became the first of the bold, cold, minimal glass boxes in landscapes which remained in high-class architectural fashion for the next 20 years. It was also the most accessible, for Johnson was lavishly generous and hospitable. It was supplemented by the all-brick Guest House a few yards away, and later by a lake pavilion and underground art galleries.

Johnson soon built up a practice of houses and apartments for rich New Yorkers, less graceful than the Glass House. Soon, bigger dishes were on the menu, including the famous Seagram Tower in Manhattan, designed by Mies with help from Johnson, who contributed the Four Seasons restaurant. By the time it was opened in 1958, Johnson was growing bored with modernist orthodoxies and had embarked on his long, unpredictable stylistic odyssey. In architecture, as in teaching and talking, he came to enjoy self-contradiction, paradox and provocation.

It was never certain what would come next. First came the camp arches of his so-called ballet-school style. At the New York State Theatre, part of the plodding Lincoln Centre, Johnson fell back on modernist solemnity. At the Kline Science Centre at Yale he took up the chunkier modernism of younger architects. One of his best efforts of the 1960s was a large, historicising addition to the Boston Public Library.

In the end, only business could furnish Johnson with the opportunity to build the overweening monuments his ego craved. The result was a rash of clever, soulless buildings "imbued with the dull complacency of wealth", in Robin Middleton's phrase. Representative are the set of skyscrapers that his firm, Johnson and Burgee, built for Houston oilmen. But in terms of the publicity which was Johnson's measure of success, they are outshone by the so-called "Chippendale skyscraper", the AT&T building in New York, finished in 1984. This earned Johnson a Time magazine cover story and unprecedented international attention, essentially because of one clever and incidental gesture, the broken pediment that tops the building.

Johnson was a unique phenomenon. Among architects, his egotism and courage put him closest to Frank Lloyd Wright, who teased and bullied him for 25 years and helped liberate his architectural thinking. But as designers, they were never in the same class.

Johnson has had a baleful influence on postmodern business architecture all over the world. In London, for instance, the insincere granite cladding of Canary Wharf owes much to his example. The professional style of Johnson's career may prove to have made a more lasting impact than his buildings. It offers a reminder that the basest superficiality and the highest purposes of art coexist strangely in architecture.

· Philip Cortelyou Johnson, architect, born July 8 1906; died January 25 2005

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by Andrew Saint
Saturday January 29, 2005
The Guardian