Philip Cortelyou Johnson (July 8, 1906 – January 25, 2005) was an American architect who designed modern and postmodern architecture. Among his best-known designs are his modernist Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut; the postmodern 550 Madison Avenue in New York City, designed for AT&T; 190 South La Salle Street in Chicago; IDS Tower in downtown Minneapolis; the Sculpture Garden of New York City's Museum of Modern Art; the postmodern Williams Tower in Houston, Texas; and the Pre-Columbian Pavilion at Dumbarton Oaks. His January 2005 obituary in The New York Times described his works as being "widely considered among the architectural masterpieces of the 20th century".
In 1930, Johnson became the first director of the architecture department of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. There he arranged for visits by Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier and negotiated the first American commission for Mies van der Rohe, after he fled Nazi Germany. In 1932, he organized with Henry-Russell Hitchcock the first exhibition dedicated to modern architecture at the Museum of Modern Art, which gave name to the subsequent movement known as International Style. In 1934, Johnson resigned his position at the museum.
During the 1930s, Johnson became an ardent admirer of Adolf Hitler, openly praised the Nazi Party, and espoused antisemitic views. He wrote for Social Justice and Examiner, where he published an admiring review of Hitler's Mein Kampf. In 1939, as a correspondent for Social Justice, he witnessed Hitler's invasion of Poland, which he later described as "a stirring spectacle". In 1941, after the U.S. entered the war, Johnson abruptly renounced his earlier views, quit journalism, and organized an anti-Fascist league at Harvard Design School. He was investigated by the FBI, and was eventually cleared for military service. He evaded indictment and jail by cooperating with the prosecution, though, according to some critics, it may have been because of his social connections; no evidence of this was ever produced. Years later he would refer to these activities as "the stupidest thing I ever did [which] I never can atone for".
In 1978, he was awarded an American Institute of Architects Gold Medal. In 1979, he was the first recipient of the Pritzker Architecture Prize. Today his skyscrapers are prominent features in the skylines of New York, Houston, Chicago, Detroit, Minneapolis, Pittsburgh, Atlanta, Madrid, and other cities.
Johnson was born in Cleveland, Ohio, on July 8, 1906, the son of a lawyer, Homer Hosea Johnson (1862–1960), and the former Louisa Osborn Pope (1869–1957), a niece of Alfred Atmore Pope and a first cousin of Theodate Pope Riddle. He had an older sister, Jeannette, and a younger sister, Theodate. He was descended from the Jansen family of New Amsterdam. His ancestors include the Huguenot Jacques Cortelyou, who laid out the first town plan of New Amsterdam for Peter Stuyvesant. He grew up in New London, Ohio. He had a stutter and was diagnosed with cyclothymia. He attended the Hackley School in Tarrytown, New York, then studied as an undergraduate at Harvard University, where he focused on learning Greek, philology, history and philosophy, particularly the work of the Pre-Socratic philosophers. He graduated in 1930.
After graduation, Johnson made a series of trips to Europe, including Germany, where his family had a summer house. He visited the landmarks of classical and Gothic architecture, and joined Henry-Russell Hitchcock, a prominent architectural historian, who was introducing Americans to the work of Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, and other modernists. In 1928, he met the German architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who was at the time designing the German Pavilion for the 1929 Barcelona International Exposition. The meeting formed the basis for a lifelong relationship of both collaboration and competition.
Johnson had a substantial fortune, largely due to his father's successful investment in the Aluminum Company of America. With this fortune, in 1930 he financed the new architecture department of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and in 1932 he was named its curator. As curator he arranged for American visits by Gropius and Le Corbusier, and negotiated the first American commission for Mies van der Rohe. In 1932, working with Hitchcock and Alfred H. Barr, Jr., he organized the first exhibition on Modern architecture at the Museum of Modern Art. The show and their simultaneously published book International Style: Modern Architecture Since 1922, published in 1932, played a seminal role in introducing modern architecture to the American public.
When the rise of the Nazis in Germany forced the modernists Marcel Breuer and Mies van der Rohe to leave Germany, Johnson helped arrange for them to work in the United States. He created a small organization called the Gray Shirts, styled after the Nazi Brownshirts.
In December 1934, Johnson abruptly left the Museum of Modern Art and began pursuing a career in journalism and politics. He first became a supporter of Huey Long, the populist governor of Louisiana. He tried and failed to recruit Long to join the National Party, which he founded. Johnson unsuccessfully ran for representative of New London in the Connecticut state legislature. After Long was assassinated in 1935, Johnson became a correspondent for Social Justice, the newspaper of the radical-populist and anti-Semitic Father Charles Coughlin. Johnson traveled to Germany and Poland as a correspondent, where he wrote admiringly about the Nazis.
In Social Justice, Johnson expressed, as The New York Times later reported, "more than passing admiration for Hitler". In the summer of 1932 Johnson attended one of the Nuremberg Rallies in Germany and saw Hitler for the first time. Years later he would describe the event to his biographer, Franz Schulze: "You simply could not fail to be caught up in the excitement of it, by the marching songs, by the crescendo and climax of the whole thing, as Hitler came on at last to harangue the crowd". He told of being thrilled at the sight of "all those blond boys in black leather" marching past the Führer. Sponsored by the German government, he traveled on a press tour which covered the invasion of Poland in 1939. Schulze dismissed these early political activities as inconsequential, concluding they merited "little more substantial attention than they have gained" and his politics "were driven as much by an unconquerable esthetic impulse as by fascist philosophy or playboy adventurism".
Architecture school and Army service
In 1941, at the age of 35, Johnson abandoned politics and journalism and enrolled in the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where he studied with Marcel Breuer and Walter Gropius, who had recently fled from Nazi Germany. In 1941, Johnson designed and built his first building, a house at 9 Ash Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The house, strongly influenced by Mies van der Rohe, has a wall around the lot which merges with the structure. It was used by Johnson to host social events and was eventually submitted as his graduate thesis; he sold the house after the war, and it was purchased by Harvard in 2010 and restored by 2016.
In 1942, while still a student of the architecture school, Johnson tried to enlist with Naval Intelligence, and then for a federal job, but was rejected both times. In 1943, after his graduation from Harvard, he was drafted to the Army and was sent to Fort Ritchie, Maryland, to interrogate German prisoners of war. He was investigated by the FBI for his involvement with the German government, Coughlin and Lawrence Dennis, an American fascist economist, and was cleared for continued military service. After the trial of Dennis and his collaborators, Johnson was relieved of his interrogation duties and transferred to Fort Belvoir, Virginia, where he spent the rest of his military service doing routine duties.
Early Modernist period (1946–1960)
In 1946, after he completed his schooling and his military service, Johnson returned to the Museum of Modern Art as a curator and writer. At the same time, he began working to establish his architectural practice. He built a small house, influenced by the work of Mies, in Sagaponack, Long Island. In 1947, he published the first monograph in English on the architecture of Mies.