Who was Philip Johnson?
The Man in the Glass House:
Philip Johnson, Architect of the Modern Century
By Mark Lamster
AIA/NY Conversation with Karrie Jacobs (January 7, 2019)
The first time I entered Bobst Library at New York University in the fall of 1973 to do some final research on my doctoral dissertation on the non-fiction writing of Daniel Defoe, I had a serious vertigo attack. Within seconds of walking through the entrance, my eyes scanned the marble floor, its Escher-like pattern causing the room to spin.
I had suffered from vertigo since I was ten but the Bobst episode was particularly acute. How I remember asking myself could Philip Johnson, the architect, have ever designed such a hypnotizing, optical illusion?
I hoped that the Dallas Morning News architectural critic and writer Mark Lamster, author of the recently published The Man in the Glass House: Philip Johnson, Architect of the Modern Century could provide an answer to this question and to others about the controversial Johnson whose Fascist leanings always troubled me.
In a conversation with Karrie Jacobs, a journalist and writer and a faculty member of the School of Visual Arts (SVA), sponsored by the American Institute of Architecture (AIA), Lamster had much to say about Johnson whom he described as both “terrible and great” and “repugnant and charming.”
Lamster spoke openly about the challenges he faced as a Jewish writer who knew Johnson’s Fascist history. While researching the book, he discovered that Johnson’s Nazi leanings were even worse than he expected. At one time, Johnson traveled with a press contingent of Nazis, who were observing death and destruction in Poland. He was trying, Lamster said, an edge to his voice, “to mainstream Fascism in America. Johnson was a perfect vessel for Nazi propaganda. He had his own money and did not need money from the German state. Most of all, Lamster said, “Philip Johnson had an incredible inferiority complex and a lust for power.”
Beyond Johnson’s controversial politics was his controversial architecture, buildings that people hated and buildings that people loved. High on Jacobs’ list of hated Johnson edifices is the Bobst building not because of its marble floor, however, but because of its huge atrium. Why, Jacobs quipped, would anyone waste that much space in Greenwich Village? A BIG laugh rippled across the audience.
Lamster understood Johnson’s penchant for atriums from a psychological perspective. Although Johnson understood architecture as a procession through time and space, his buildings ironically had giant atriums, stasis, in the center. “It is an analogy for Johnson himself,” Laster explained. “He was always looking for other people to fill him up.”
Beyond the Bobst, most prominent on the list of buildings that Lamster hates are: the University of Houston School of Architecture Building, a boxy structure that critics said was a copy of an unexecuted design by the French architect Claude-Nicolas Ledoux; Momentum Place (Dallas, 1987); the Chapel of St. Basil on the campus of the University of St. Thomas in Houston (1997); and several other office towers, many from the 1980s.
On the list of Johnson buildings Lamster loves are: the Sculpture Garden at MoMA (1953); the East Wing of MoMA (1964); the Museum Pavilion for the Robert Woods Bliss Collection of Pre-Columbian Art, Dunbarton Oaks, Pennzoil Place (Houston, 1975); and many of Johnson’s residential designs from the 1950s, including the Davis House in Minneapolis, (1952) and the Glass House in New Canaan, CT (1949), which Lamster describes as an extraordinary work of autobiography. “Living in The Glass House was Johnson’s statement about who he was as a provocateur,” Lamster said. “He was a showman who loved being entertaining.” Jacobs jumped in:“ He would have been on Twitter,” she said.
Although many critics have accused Johnson of copying the works of others, during the ten years that it took for Lamster to research and write the book, he came to respect him. “He was a complex man: a man who lived openly as a gay man in the 1920s but, when it became verboten, subsequently a man who lived publicly as a heterosexual. He suffered from bipolar disorder, with a personality where change was inherent.”
Everything about him was a mixture. Despite his Fascism and Antisemitism, face-to-face, he had Jewish friends like Lincoln Kirsten. Johnson and Mies Van der Rohe collaborated on the Seagram Building even though they were opposites. “Johnson idolized Mies,” Lamster said, “and Mies came to respect Johnson.” When Frank Lloyd Wright and Johnson worked together on an exhibit on modern architecture, Johnson wrote a essay entitled, “The Frontiersman.” The beautifully written piece focused on Wright’s Taliesin West. Although Johnson praised Wright in his opening line, “In my opinion, Frank Lloyd Wright is the greatest living architect….” the title of his paper, according to Lamster, was definitely intended as a dig.
During the conversation, a couple dozen images flashed by in a loop on a slide show above the stage. One that kept appearing and one that elicited a chuckle from the audience was a photo of a young Donald Trump about to introduce Philip Johnson to the press.
The third time the Trump photo appeared, Lamster paused to tell the audience what Donald Trump actually said on that occasion. After introducing Johnson, Trump proclaimed: “And ladies, he is still available.”
