Architect Philip Johnson Dies at 98

JEFFREY BROWN:

Philip Johnson, who died Tuesday night at age 98, not only lived for almost a century, but helped define the changing look of that century– from the glass towers that came to dominate so many American cities, to a return to more classical forms, to buildings using a mix of styles in playful ways.

Johnson the man was also a dynamic force, a provocateur and fierce advocate who was at the center of architecture and design circles for decades. Joining us to talk about the man and his legacy is Paul Goldberger, dean of the Parsons School of Design, and architecture critic for the New Yorker Magazine.

Paul, welcome. Just to start with the work itself, Johnson's early work was part of what was called international style modernism. What was that and what did he do with it?

PAUL GOLDBERGER:

Okay. International-style modernism, which is a term that he helped to name, actually, because he began his career not as an architect, but as an historian and sort of an appreciator of architecture in a way.

He traveled through Europe in the 30s and saw some of the developing new modern architecture there, and helped bring it to this country, and mounted a big exhibit called "The International Style" in 1932 at the Museum of Modern Art. It's that style that we think of as glass boxes, austere, abstract forms that in those days didn't seem tired and too common, the way it often has lately, that actually very fresh and daring and radical.

JEFFREY BROWN:

Then, of course, his first… his most important first building grew out of that, and that was his own home, right, the glass house?

PAUL GOLDBERGER:

Yes. That's right. He was — of all the international style architects Johnson admired, the one who influenced his own work the most was Mies Van Der Rohe, who more or less invented the idea of an elegant, austere, glass architecture.

And Johnson was his greatest disciple, his most loyal disciple. And he built himself a glass house in New Caanan, Connecticut, that ultimately, I think, may well have been his greatest building, and surely one of the great buildings created by any architect for his own use.

JEFFREY BROWN:

And why? Tell us what makes a glass house so special.

PAUL GOLDBERGER:

Well, it's not just a box of glass, of course, it's an exceptionally elegant, serene, austere place that makes you rethink the whole connection between inside and outside. In fact, people often say, "well, how could there be privacy in a glass house?"

Well, there was plenty of privacy in Johnson's glass house because the landscaping became the wall, and the connections between inside and outside were, in effect, obliterated by the beauty and openness of the landscape so that you could be in this house, it's almost like a pavilion, and then sit in the middle of nature even when you were indoors.

It was a very profound thing that architecture couldn't really do until modern architecture and technology made that possible. It was a building very much influenced by Mies Van Der Rohe, but Johnson gave it his own take, his own twist, very dramatically it's really his building.

It's very classical, it's very symmetrical. Johnson was always interested in history. And what he was most driven to do there was not to create something that looked as modern as a spaceship. He wanted something that had the serenity, the symmetry, the pure order of a classical Greek temple, let's say, but interpreted in the forms of modern architecture.

JEFFREY BROWN:

Now, at the same time, he also famously changed styles. Tell us how he developed, and why he moved.

PAUL GOLDBERGER:

Well, he had one of the most restless intellectually energetic minds I've ever encountered. You know, I've often said that he was not the greatest architect of our time, but he might have been the greatest architectural mind of our time.

He was part scholar, part historian. He passionately loved ideas, and he had a very, very low threshold of boredom. And I think after a few years, he felt he'd kind of worked his way through Mies Van Der Rohe. He had collaborated with Van Der Rohe in the creation of one of the great postwar skyscrapers of all time, the Seagram Building in New York.

And by the time that was done in 1958, he was ready for something else. And he moved back toward classicism. He looked even harder than he had before for a way in which you could combine certain things about traditional architecture with modernism and with a sense of our moment.

And so he began in the '60s to do a whole series of buildings like the New York State Theater at Lincoln Center or the Sheldon Art Gallery at the University of Nebraska, the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, all of which were kind of new versions of classical temperature presidents in a way. And Johnson kept playing with that with his restless mind for years, and then he changed again and again a couple of times. He was open to other influences in a way that almost no first- rate designer that I know has been.

JEFFREY BROWN:

You called him in a piece you wrote for the New York Times a "combination godfather, gadfly, scholar, patron, critic, curator and cheerleader." That's quite a combination.

PAUL GOLDBERGER:

Well, he was all of those things. He was… you know, he may not have been our greatest architect, but he was our greatest architectural presence. He was the force that made architecture central to American culture right now.

You know, he helped create the department of architecture at the Museum of Modern Art, the first architecture department of any museum. He ran it for many years. He ran his whole life as a kind of public, ongoing symposium, or salon, about architecture.

He was most interested in the new, and would soak it up with an eagerness that, I have to say, would have been astonishing in somebody of 40, but it kept going when he was 90. He just wanted to meet younger people and hear what was on their minds, and figure out how he could somehow take those ideas and turn them into works of art of his own.

JEFFREY BROWN:

And he also, though, as a personality ran to some extreme, right? In the 30s he more than flirted with some extreme right-wing politics. Much later in his life, of course, he was a kind of cultural celebrity in New York culture.

PAUL GOLDBERGER:

Right, right. His whole flirtation with fascism in the 30s is a pretty shameful period. Happily, after years of denying it, he admitted it and apologized for it. I think it came as much from almost, strange as it seems, a kind of aesthetic awe.

He was a profound espy. And it was kind of like Lenny Wiesenthal view of things. He was looking at what was going on in Germany from what was, in fact, a dangerously narrow aesthetic viewpoint, and not thinking enough of the horrendous political implications of it.

Over the years, he pulled back, back, back from it, so much so that he became a liberal Democrat in the end and not a right-winger. But it's definitely a pretty shameful period. And he eventually learned that, in fact, to romanticize aesthetics; divorced from content and meaning in a social sense was, in fact, a terrible mistake.

I think that's one of the things that saved him. I think he would have been a kind of irrelevant old man if he had held on to a pure, 100 percent obsession with aesthetics. It was his ability over the years to integrate those things with the rest of life that rescued him from that.

JEFFREY BROWN:

Okay. And in the end, hardly irrelevant at all. Paul Goldberger, thank you very much.

PAUL GOLDBERGER:

Thank you.