(This obituary is excerpted from The New York Times of Jan. 27, 2005.)
Philip Johnson, who went from enfant terrible to elder statesman of American architecture, died Tuesday at the compound surrounding the Glass House, the residence he built for himself in New Canaan, Conn. He was 98.
His death was disclosed by David Whitney, his companion of 45 years.
Johnson first became famous as an impassioned advocate of modern architecture, and his early writings helped establish the reputation of European modernists like Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius in this country. He later experimented with decorative classicism, embraced post-modernism and then returned to modernism.
His own architecture received mixed reviews. He was often accused of pandering to fashion and of designing buildings that were facile and shallow. Yet he created several designs, including the Glass House, the sculpture garden of the Museum of Modern Art and the pre-Columbian gallery at Dumbarton Oaks, that are widely considered among architectural masterworks of the 20th Century.
He was the first winner of the Pritzker Prize, the $100,000 award established in 1979 by the Pritzker family of Chicago to honor an architect of international stature. In 1978, he won the Gold Medal of the American Institute of Architects, the highest award the American profession bestows on any of its members.
As an architect, he made his mark arguing the importance of the aesthetic side of architecture and claimed that he had no interest in buildings except as works of art. Yet he was so eager to build that he willingly took commissions from real estate developers who refused to meet his aesthetic standards. He liked to refer to himself, with only some irony, as a whore.
And in the 1930s, this man who believed that art ranked above all else took a controversial detour into right-wing politics, suspending his career to work on behalf of Gov. Huey Long of Louisiana and later the radio priest Father Charles Coughlin, and expressing more than passing admiration for Hitler.
That foray into fascism was over by the time the United States entered World War II, and in the mid-1950s he sought to publicly atone to Jews by designing a synagogue in Port Chester, N.Y., for no fee.
A self-crafted celebrity, he became the best-known living architect in the 1980s and 90s, a common sight on television programs and magazine covers.
His early work was heavily influenced by Mies. But in the late 1950s, just after he had collaborated with Mies on the Seagram Building on Park Avenue, he introduced elements of classical architecture into his buildings, beginning a long quest to find ways of connecting contemporary architecture to historical form. It was a quest that would begin with highly abstracted versions of classicism in the 1960s and culminate in a much more literal use of the architectural forms of the past in his revivalist skyscrapers of the 1980s.
That phase of Johnson’s career included such well-known monuments as the classically detailed pink-granite AT&T Building (now the Sony building) on New York’s Madison Avenue, which he completed in 1984 with John Burgee, then his partner; the Republic Bank tower (now NCNB Center) in Houston, which used elements of Flemish Renaissance architecture; the Transco Tower (now the Williams Tower) in Houston, which recapitulated the setback forms of a romantic 1920s tower in glass; and the PPG Place in Pittsburgh, a reflective glass tower whose Gothic form copied the shape of the tower of the Houses of Parliament in London.
His 90th birthday, in July 1996, was marked by symposiums, lectures, an outpouring of essays in his honor and back-to-back dinners at two venerable New York institutions he had played a major role in creating: the Museum of Modern Art, whose department of architecture and design he joined in 1930, and the Four Seasons restaurant, which he designed as part of the Seagram Building in 1958.
Born to wealth in Cleveland in 1906, Johnson went to Harvard to study Greek, but became excited by architecture and spent the years immediately after his graduation in 1927 touring Europe and looking at the early buildings of the developing modern architecture movement. He teamed up with Henry-Russell Hitchcock, at that time the movement’s chief academic partisan in the United States, and their travels together resulted in their book “The International Style,” published in 1932, which played a major role in introducing Americans to the work of European modernists like Mies, Gropius and Le Corbusier.
In 1930, Johnson joined the architecture department at the then-new Museum of Modern Art in New York. There, he sponsored exhibitions on contemporary themes and arranged for visits by Gropius, Le Corbusier and Mies, for whom he also negotiated his first American commission.
Johnson left the museum in 1936 to pursue his political agenda, dividing his time among Berlin, Louisiana and his family’s home in Ohio. By the summer of 1940, his infatuation with right-wing politics had faded and, in 1941, he enrolled at the Harvard Graduate School of Design to begin the process of becoming an architect.
After wartime service in the United States Army, he returned in 1946 to the Museum of Modern Art. At the same time, he began to slowly build up an architectural practice of his own, combining it with his career as a writer and curator. In 1946, he designed a small, boxy house, highly influenced by Mies, for a client in Sagaponack, N.Y., on Long Island. But his first significant building, and still perhaps his most famous, was for his own use: the Glass House in New Canaan, completed in 1949 with its counterpoint, a brick guest house. The serene Glass House, a 56-foot-by-32-foot rectangle, is generally considered one of the 20th Century’s greatest residential structures.
He and Whitney, a curator and art dealer, lived for many years in a town house on East 52nd Street that Johnson had originally designed as a guest house for John D. Rockefeller 3d; then in an elaborately decorated apartment in Museum Tower above the Museum of Modern Art; and always on weekends in the Glass House compound.
He had lunch daily amid other prominent and powerful New Yorkers at a special table in the corner of the Grill Room of the Four Seasons. For years, his table functioned as a kind of miniature architectural salon. In the evenings, he was frequently seen at exclusive social events, first mostly by himself and, in the last decade -- as he felt greater ease in making his relationship with Whitney public -- with his companion. He was among the few architects whose comings and goings were considered worthy of notice in the gossip columns.
In addition to Whitney, Johnson is survived by a sister, Jeannette Dempsey, now 102, of Cleveland.
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