Philip Johnson Dead at 98
Posted by JoeVare, 27 Jan 2005

The New York Times has reported that legendary architect Philip Johnson died at his Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut, US (about an hour outside New York City). Johnson was 98.
He led a remarkably interesting life, and had more influence over the direction of architecture than any single person should probably ever have. He coined the phrase "International Style", helped work on the Seagram Building with Mies van der Rohe, legitimized Post Modernism in the late 1970s with the AT&T Building, and pushed Frank Gehry, Daniel Libeskind and Zaha hadid into the mainstream with his Deconstructivist Architecture exhibit at MoMA a decade later.

His buildings are not universally loved, although there seem to be some exceptions. Everyone seems to love the MoMA Sculpture Garden in New York (although not necessarily his addition to the building), as well as his Glass House. The Seagram Building has received much praise, although it is usually credited more to Mies than it is to Johnson (with the exception of its Four Seasons Restaurant).

Johnson came from a priviliged background, graduated from Harvard in with an Architectural History degree, spent a time in the 1930s as a Hitler supporting fascist, tried to be a politician, served in the army, got his architectural degree when he was 35, worked at MoMA as its architectural curator, won the first Pritzker Pirize and amassed an amazing collection of modern and contemporary art. Johnson was gay and spent the last 45 years with the same man, even though he chose to keep their relationship away from the public, with the exception of the last decade or so.

See some pictures of his work and link to a few of his projects at the Philip Johnson page at ArBITAT Architects

Now that He's Dead, Did You Know He Was a Gay Nazi?
Posted by JoeVare, 15 Feb 2005

An Op-Ed piece in tne New York Times the week after Philip Johnson's death by Mark Stevens titled :Form Follows Fascism" started a trend of Philip Johnson bashing by throwing his checkered past and lack of (many) strong designs against him. Considering what a powerful influence he was, it is especially disturbing that so many people with such strong feelings about Johnson's past kept quiet when he was alive, waiting for his death to redefine him. However deserved it may be, it still feels wrong to wait until he can no longer defend himself before bringing it up.

From "Form Follows Fascism", published 31 January 2005 in the NY Times:

Philip Johnson did not just flirt with fascism. He spent several years in his late 20's and early 30's - years when an artist's imagination usually begins to jell - consumed by fascist ideology. He tried to start a fascist party in the United States. He worked for Huey Long and Father Coughlin, writing essays on their behalf. He tried to buy the magazine American Mercury, then complained in a letter, "The Jews bought the magazine and are ruining it, naturally." He traveled several times to Germany. He thrilled to the Nuremberg rally of 1938 and, after the invasion of Poland, he visited the front at the invitation of the Nazis.

He approved of what he saw. "The German green uniforms made the place look gay and happy," he wrote in a letter. "There were not many Jews to be seen. We saw Warsaw burn and Modlin being bombed. It was a stirring spectacle." As late as 1940, Mr. Johnson was defending Hitler to the American public. It seems that only an inquiry by the Federal Bureau of Investigation - and, presumably, the prospect of being labeled a traitor if America entered the war - led him to withdraw completely from politics.

Today, any debate over an important figure with a fascist or Communist background easily becomes an occasion for blame games between right and left. Mr. Johnson is no exception. Morally serious people can have different views of his personal culpability.

From the New York Observer:

"The fact is that notwithstanding his aesthetic and intellectual talents, Philip Johnson remained at heart a cynic, an immoralist and a profoundly corrupted character—in short, an evil influence."

From the Washington Post:

I leave it to others to determine whether Johnson's amorality bears a relationship to the chilly skyscrapers he built, or whether his politics influenced the celebrated glass-walled house he designed for himself, whose brick interior he once said had been inspired by the brick foundations of a "burned-out wooden village I saw," presumably in Poland. But his death makes me think that the rest of us should occasionally reflect a bit harder about why we find it so easy to condemn the likes of Prince Harry, a silly, thoughtless boy, and so hard to condemn Philip Johnson, a brilliant, witty aesthete. Or why it was thought scandalous when an allegedly anti-Semitic Ukrainian businessman was allowed to ride on Colin Powell's plane to Kiev last week, while Johnson, who once wrote a positive review of "Mein Kampf," lectured at Harvard University. Or why the Nuremberg tribunal didn't impose the death penalty on the urbane Albert Speer, Hitler's architect, or why the Academy Awards ceremony in 2004 solemnly noted the death of Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler's filmmaker, or why Herbert von Karajan, a Nazi Party member who never apologized at all -- party membership, he once said, "advanced my career" -- continued to conduct orchestras in all the great concert halls of Europe. We may think we believe any affiliation with Nazism is wrong, but as a society, our actual definition of "collaboration" is in fact quite slippery.

In the end, I suspect the explanation is simple: People whose gifts lie in esoteric fields get a pass that others don't. Or, to put it differently, if you use crude language and wear a swastika, you're a pariah. But if you make up a complex, witty persona, use irony and jokes to brush off hard questions, and construct an elaborate philosophy to obfuscate your past, then you're an elder statesman, a trendsetter, a provocateur and -- most tantalizingly -- an enigma.