Johnson, Philip Cortelyou b.July 8, 1906; Cleveland, Ohio d. January 29, 2005; New Canaan, Connecticut
Leading twentieth-century architect who was a Nazi sympathizer during the 1930s. Johnson graduated from Harvard University with a degree in philosophy in 1930. As the first director of the Architecture Department at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, Johnson was involved in organizing the famous International School of Architecture Exhibition at the museum in 1932.
He coauthored the book, International Style: Architecture since 1922 (1932), with architectural historian Henry Russell Hitchcock and is thus regarded as one of the coiners of the term International style. After the exhibition, Johnson toured Nazi Germany. He was fascinated with Fascist aesthetics and he sympathized with Nazi ideology. Back in the United States, Johnson flirted with the populist right-wing politician Huey Long and in particular with the notorious antisemitic radio priest, Father Charles Coughlin. Johnson published antisemitic articles in Coughlin’s journal Social Justice. In 1939 Johnson went back to Germany at the invitation of the Nazi Propaganda Ministry. As a guest of the Nazi government he followed the German army on its invasion into Poland and witnessed the bombing ofWarsaw. Back in the United States, he was investigated by the FBI but continued to defend the Nazis. In 1940 Johnson went back to Harvard to study architecture, graduating in 1943 and entering military service. He returned to his former position at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1946, remaining until 1955, when he started his own architectural firm.After the war, Johnson repented for his pro-Nazi views. He designed a synagogue, Kneses Tifereth Israel in Port Chester, New York, free of charge. Johnson also wrote a brief foreword to Rachel Wischnitzer’s still- influential 1955 book, Synagogue Architecture in the United States: History and Interpretation.
The art historian Wischnitzer was a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany. After the war, Johnson emerged as one of the leading modern architects in the United States and beyond. In 1949 he designed the now classic Glass House as a residence for himself in New Canaan, Connecticut. The German-born architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886—1969) had a major impact on Johnson, who had organized Mies’s first trip to America. With Mies, Johnson designed the Seagram Building on New York’s Park Avenue in 1958, a landmark international style skyscraper. Johnson was also involved in the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts project in New York in the mid-1960s. Famous buildings by Johnson are the Pennzoil Building in Houston (1976), the AT&T Skyscraper in New York (1984), and the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company (1984). The AT&T Skyscraper with its curious Chippendale top is regarded as one of the first postmodern skyscrapers because Johnson employed historic styles, an approach that International style architects hitherto had emphatically rejected. Philip Johnson was the first recipient of the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 1979. He semiretired in 1989 but continued to design buildings in the United States and abroad until his death at the age of 98.Tobias Brinkmann
See also Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig
References and Further Reading
Schulze, Franz. Philip Johnson: Life and Work.
New York: Knopf, 1994.