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The debate over Philip Johnson's past and ongoing legacy continues: after The ---- Johnson Study Group published an open letter calling for all institutions to remove the name of Philip Johnson from "every leadership title, public space, and honorific of any form" in response to the architect's... View full entry
Following a letter released November 27, 2020 by The ---- Johnson Study Group calling for all institutions to remove the name of Philip Johnson from "every leadership title, public space, and honorific of any form," Sarah Whiting, Dean and Josep Lluís Sert Professor of Architecture at the... View full entry
The ---- Johnson Study Group, an online organization "studying the legacy of a 20th century white supremacist [Philip Johnson] who founded the most significant modern architectural institutions in the United States" has released the following letter calling for all institutions to remove the name... View full entry
In “The Man in the Glass House,” Mark Lamster’s brisk, clear-eyed new biography of Johnson, we are asked to contemplate why the impresario of twentieth-century architecture descended into such a morass of far-right politics—and how, given the depths to which he fell, he managed to clamber his way not just out of it, but to the top. [...] Johnson managed to abjure his past and, on the march toward an exceptionally successful career, leave it behind. — The New Yorker
The New Yorker reviews the new Philip Johnson biography, The Man in the Glass House by architecture critic and professor Mark Lamster, and examines how Johnson eagerly embraced Fascism before WWII and still rose to great fame as America's iconic 20th-century architect. "Indeed, it is... View full entry
Johnson returned home certain his life had been transformed. He found in Nazism a new international ideal. The aesthetic power and exaltation he experienced in viewing modernist architecture found its complete national expression in the Hitler-centered Fascist movement. Here was a way not merely to rebuild cities with a unified and monumental aesthetic vision for the Machine Age but to spur a rebirth of mankind itself. He had never expressed any interest in politics before. That had now changed. — Vanity Fair
"Over the next two years, Johnson moved back and forth between Europe and New York City. At home, he mounted shows and promoted modernist artists whose works he considered the best of the new. All the while, he kept an eye on the Nazis as they consolidated power. He had slept with his share of men... View full entry
Philip Johnson was a terrible, hateful human being. And he wasn't just some casual Nazi sympathizer whispering, "maybe Hitler has some good ideas" in shadowy bars, either. He actively campaigned for Nazi causes in the U.S. and around the world.
Johnson visited Germany in the 1930s at the invitation of the government's Propaganda Ministry. He wrote numerous articles for far right publications. He started a fascist organization called the Gray Shirts in the United States...
— paleofuture.gizmodo.com
A partial or complete tear-down of Schlumberger’s 10-building corporate campus off Sunset Lane and Old Quarry Road could save the company millions in maintenance costs but would take a chunk out of the town’s tax roll and could include the demolition of a building designed by famed architect Philip Johnson. — acorn-online.com
